Dracula as Tragedy and Mirror
Afternotes |II| IV: Viragh's "Can the Vampire Speak" and the Specter of the Familiar
It is perhaps easy to take for granted the cultural dominance of Dracula. To assume retroactively that it’s natural for vampires to be far and away the most popular fantastical creature, and Dracula the definitive example of it. Even now, near a century and a quarter after his debut.
Why is he still around, haunting us in ever newer incarnations?
Though obviously overdetermined, one underexplored stab is humanity's fascination with failures, with dramatic falls from grace. In Dracula we have a once-powerful figure from an ancient and notable family who is forced to leave his homeland just to survive, and to give up his traditions and language to assimilate in order to feed. The popular interpretation is to see Dracula as invader, as foreign colonizing force - but the actual threat, as evidenced in the damage he wreaks on London, is quite tame. In this light, he seems more victim than perpetrator.
And it's this kind of dynamism that partly explains his continued resonance - that he can be seen in a so many compelling ways.
So using Atilla Viragh’s “Can the Vampire Speak?: Dracula as Discourse on Cultural Extinction” as a foundation and a jumping-off point, I want to explore how and why his tragic descent strikes a familiar chord, and connect it with the discourses we’ve examined thus far in this extended afternotes excursion.
To what extent is Dracula a mirror? Let’s peek in.
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“How Fascinating all failures are!” (p. 146) Oscar Wilde once exclaimed in a letter referencing Jefferson Davis. And the reception to fall-from-the-heights narratives such as Romeo and Juliet, Oedipus, and more recently of biopics like A Beautiful Mind and A Wolf of Wall Street suggests he’s struck onto something. Which a group of University of Vermont researchers provided support for when they analyzed the emotional arcs of 1,700 novels and found that “fall from grace” stories were among the more popular of the 6 general emotional patterns they found.
So tragedy is popular - it’s doubtful this is much a surprise to anyone. But is Dracula really a tragic figure, beyond obviously his demise at the end of the novel?
The evidence, starting with Harker’s second encounter with the Count as he is browsing his host’s library for the first time, is not inconsiderable. There, after noticing with “great delight… a vast number of English books, whole shelves full of them… all relating to England and English life and customs and manners,” Dracula enters. And in his first extensive remarks, he addresses Harker:
“These friends”—and he laid his hands on some of the books—“have been good friends to me, and for some years past, ever since I had the idea of going to London, have given me many, many hours of pleasure. Through them I have come to know your great England; and to know her is to love her. I long to go through the crowded streets of your mighty London, to be in the midst of the whirl and rush of humanity, to share its life, its change, its death, and all that makes it what it is. But alas! as yet I only know your tongue through books”.
Here Dracula is talking about a foreign country he’s about to move to and seeming to contrast it with his own. London is “mighty” and “crowded” in the “midst of the whirl and rush” - qualities perhaps missing in his native Romania, a place in contrast suggested to be weak, solitary and unpeopled.
And yet in this weak, solitary and unpeopled place he is somebody, he is known, respected, feared even. His economic position is assured, as indicated by his castle and his “great heaps of coins”. He apparently rules over a horde of women, who are trapped in his castle. His family name is one of distinction, and he is the result of a long distinguished line, as he relates a few days later after being asked of his history:
“We Székelys have a right to be proud, for in our veins flows the blood of many brave races who fought as the lion fights, for lordship. Here, in the whirlpool of European races, the Ugric tribe bore down from Iceland the fighting spirit which Thor and Wodin gave them, which the Berserkers displayed to such fell intent on the seaboards of Europe, ay, and of Asia and Africa too, till the peoples thought that the werewolves themselves had come. Here, too, when they came, they found the Huns, whose warlike fury had swept the earth like a living flame, till the dying peoples held that in their veins ran the blood of those old witches, who, expelled from Scythia, had mated with the devils in the desert. Fools, Fools! What devil or what witch was ever so great as Attila, whose blood is in these veins?” He held up his arms. “Is it a wonder that we were a conquering race; that we were proud; that when the Magyar, the Lombard, the Avar, the Bulgar, or the Turk poured his thousands on our frontiers, we drove them back?”
Yet even here the cracks, the flaws in Dracula begin to show themselves. In relating the glory of his name, he reveals the tragedy of time and what it has wrought on him. Immortal, but not immune to the violence of experience upon memory, of change and discontinuity and the struggle to survive. For there is little here that makes any sense, should the listener examine it in any detail. For he identifies with the Székely people, a Hungarian population, invokes their parent “Ugric tribe” and then somehow tries to associate them with Norse conquerors, even though there is no such link. He later claims that the Székely “threw off the Hungarian yoke”, even the two were assimilated.
Even more notable is that virtually every people - the Scythians, the Lombards, the Huns, the Avars, the Bulgarshe - he invokes here no longer exist in Transylvania.
This is not a record of colonization but rather of annihilation.
And throughout the discussion he keeps on bringing up and claiming link to peoples with no relation to him. For example, at one point he says, “When the flags of the Wallach and the Magyar went down beneath the Crescent, who was it but one of my own race who as Voivode crossed the Danube and beat the Turk on his own ground?”.
And yet the Voivode were not Székely but rather Wallachian.
Later he says, “After the Battle of Mohács, we threw off the Hungarian yoke, we of the Dracula blood were amongst its leaders”.
But it was not the Székely but rather the Turks who won that battle.
So Dracula conflates his history of that of the Norse, Hunnic, Scythian, and Wallachian peoples. Incidentally, Dracula scoffs at any affiliation with the Hungarians, the closest actual relatives of the Székely.
As Viragh notes: “These divergent and contradictory ethnic strands reveal Dracula’s inability to clearly articulate his cultural history… Although he tries, the subaltern vampire ca-not speak, to borrow Gayatri Spivak’s famous phrase, through Western forms of historical representation. Dracula’s oral history, so bewilderingly mixed up with disparate ethnic-linguistic groups, is that of someone who is losing his historical record. A firsthand witness to the annihilation of cultures in the ‘whirlpool’ of Transylvania, he stands as the last heir to these ruined civilizations.” Last heir whose memory is disintegrating and fragmenting as he considers a move to a foreign land where any claim to power or prestige will be lost.
But London represents a new feeding ground as opportunities in his homeland shrivel up. But what is his orientation to this move? The early quote on his admiration of London suggests excitement - but later comments reveal an underlying anxiety. Speaking of the impending move, he says:
A stranger in a strange land, he is no one; men know him not—and to know not is to care not for. I am content if I am like the rest, so that no man stops if he see me, or pause in his speaking if he hear my words and say, ‘Ha, ha! a stranger!’ I have been so long master that I would be master still—or at least that none should be master of me.
Master in Transylvania, what will he be in London? As Viragh remarks, Dracula is nothing if not meticulous in his use of English throughout the novel, in sharp contrast to some of the other characters. So this does not appear to be a passing comment, but one which marks a sentiment earnestly felt, and studiously acted on. Dracula fears being seen as an Other, and thus socially excluded. He wants to be seen as the same, and therefore known and cared for. A “last heir” of dying civilizations, forced to leave the only place where he has any power or distinction for the unknown, he wants to avoid being mocked, to keep his claim to be “master”, not looked down on by anyone.
In this light, his assimilation into London appears less as colonization and more “as a loss, and a propagation of this loss... since he surrenders cultural and linguistic mastery as he enters London”. “A stranger in a strange land, he is no one,” says Dracula, as if this is his most feared fate.
Where does this fear come from?
Feelings of inferiority and anonymity, which are so central to Dracula’s anxiety, are typically found in deracinated peoples trying to assimilate. Dracula claims to be “known” in his land, but in the story he does not seem to have compatriots, aside from the “Slavs” and “Szgany” who do his bidding, presumably for money, and the Romanian villagers, who shun him. His estate, then, is one of phantoms (the three women in the castle) rather than the crowd of living humanity. In order to regain cultural participation and overcome his obsolescence and irrelevance, he has resolved (after no little deliberation) to move to the West, to learn the imperial language, and to acculturate even if his erstwhile mastery and cultural prestige (“noble,” “boyar,”) will lose their meaning and may even become objects of ridicule. His native language—which we never hear—is thus a source of vulnerability; Dracula fears being laughed at ‘if [a man] hear my words.’ Dracula’s linguistic and cultural silencing have already begun even before he has left Transylvania.
Dracula is a monster in the sense that he can and does do things that most people would consider horrifying - drinking the blood of living humans. But, like Frankenstein’s monster, he is not absent the very human needs for affiliation and intimacy. Indeed, in most essential matters he seems as human as any person. This sharply complicates his situation and prospects. Viragh continues:
“His decision to enter what he calls “your mighty London” and adopt its language and cultural practices reveals a desire to internalize Western paradigms, a longing for their promises of life and power. But Dracula can enter into this quest for power only at the price of cultural assimilation, which is represented in the novel as a death-in-life, a vampiric ‘feeding’ off of the lifeblood of another people.”
His need to be socially included necessitates personal contortions, perhaps even beyond that required to feed. And so there is an odd inversion here, in which the supposed conqueror appears more as sad figure of decay. Even his victims seem to represent a threat, for he “sacrifices both his bodily and cultural self in the act of ‘draining’ them: he must abandon his homeland, learn English, become a bat. Indeed, it is not only Lucy and Mina who are dramatically transformed in the draining, but Dracula himself, whose transformations are much more varied and complex than those of his victims. He appears variously as an old man, a lizard, a dog, a wolf, a bat, a mist. Whatever significance one assigns to these particular incarnations, the multiplicity of possible identifications is as bewildering as Dracula’s historical narrative. The vampire’s bodilessness and lack of language are signs of the oblivion that is corollary to cultural assimilation. ...when Dracula drains his victims, he mingles his blood with theirs, preserving their essence while destroying their identity. Yet this destructive draining is a two-way affair, as the vampire has also sacrificed virtually all aspects of his identity by moving to England to ‘feed.’ It seems that Dracula’s self-preservation is a grotesque and desperate process without any hope of cultural propagation or national expansion.”
But is this sympathy for the vampire being taken too far? Surely as the attacker he is more perpetrator than victim? Viragh addresses this head-on, reminding readers that:
“It is not in his capacity as a cultural being that he enters England, but as a disembodied, nameless, ahistorical fiend whose very humanity seems to have been horribly transmogrified—or, we might say, “drained”—in the process of his assimilation to English culture... In this sense, we might see the figure of the vampire as a type of the subaltern whose social incorporation depends on the sacrifice of his linguistic, cultural, and historical identity; he pitifully feeds on the foreign culture, not to really survive, nor to speak, but only to spread the grave-mounds that symbolize the death of a civilization.”
Thus the figure of Dracula as doomed figure arises from the mist of grandeur in which he tried to surround himself. Perhaps he himself knew he was doomed from the start, and just wanted to go somewhere where his last days would be witnessed by more than the shadowy denizens and malevolent villagers of his castle and homeland, respectively. But the cultural price of that last venture looms large - perhaps even more so than his physical death. So much so that one wonders what exactly was lost when he was killed. For indeed, he appears to have self-mutilated himself beyond recognition by that point.
But at least no one laughed at him.
Yet what does a “disembodied, nameless, ahistorical fiend” have to do with us? How could any of us identify with such a creature?
Let us count the ways.
First, though, perhaps the full weight of the tragedy we witness in Dracula is not clear, particularly to American audiences, used as they are to celebrating discontinuity as an opportunity for reinvention, of valorizing historical absences and cultural vacuums as freedom, and individualism as the standard-bearer for what is right and beautiful in the world. One can readily imagine a cheery optimistic American version of Dracula in which he moves to London, “discovers himself”, finds a new group of friends, and lives happily ever after - dying civilizations be damned.
Which raises the question - what really was lost here? And that requires a brief discursion into the meaning of life, and other minor matters. Of identity and resilience and the nature of the self.
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Life is a very narrow bridge between two eternities. Do not be afraid
-Rabbi Nachman of Braslav (quoted in Cushman).
There are a variety of ways in which this quote could be interpreted, but psychotherapist Philip Cushman believes that ultimately it refers to how human life is a link between an eternity of ancestors behind one, and an eternity of descendants ahead of one. And that the meaning of life is to be that bridge - to take the ideas and traditions handed off to one, reshape them as necessary according to experience, and then hand them on down to the next generation. Such thinking is far from alien to a variety of discourses within the humanities and sciences. Heidegger and Gadamer long ago posited that human beings are unavoidably cultural - in Levi-Strauss’s words culture is “sedimented” in the body, and recent research on the importance of the transmission of cultural knowledge and of narratives in families contains some familiar echoes.
And so these ideas, if true, illustrate the degree to which Dracula’s self-imposed self-immolation as regards his culture was damaging. He’s undermining the very basis of human life, and the brightest of candles we have to hold back the darkness. And seemingly without a new basis upon which to render his existence meaningful (hence his focus - his “falling back” on mere affiliation).
But what renders his final condition, his tragedy, particularly poignant to audiences is the ways in which his existence as “disembodied, nameless, ahistorical fiend” bears a remarkably uncanny resemblance to the modern self, the one that’s emerged since the end of the feudal era (part of a process that no doubt that’s accelerated in the present era, particularly post WWII). This is what psychologist Philip Cushman (echoing Fromm and Riesman) has termed the “empty self” - one that “experiences a significant absence of community, tradition, and shared meaning. It experiences these social absences and their consequences ‘interiorly’ as a lack of personal conviction and worth, and it embodies the absences as a chronic, undifferentiated emotional hunger”.
Despite Dracula’s pose, what but a emaciated sense of personal worth could have caused him to - once in England - throw away his entire cultural history, all to avoid being laughed at and slightly increase his affiliative chances? What but emotional hunger motivated him to become a chameleon?
I think most of us sense that there is a story of our family and larger lineage. But how do you miss what you never had? How do you mourn what you never knew, what was never given you? What happens to Dracula in a single long lifetime is what happens across the generations in America. Every ensuing generation the familial and personal narrative grows more incoherent, and the cultural silencing that Dracula does to himself is passed on to the next generation in the form of the lack of mirroring and elaboration. The path is different but the result the same - the death of cultures, of anything approaching a meaningful family history, and a silent, empty self, absent the traditional structures which allow for the flowering of the individual into something resembling a human being.
Perhaps, unlike Dracula, there never were any heights to fall from other than a self that had coherent and meaningful links to traditions or to persons outside the present age. And also unlike Dracula, who consciously gave up his cultural heritage to blend in and survive, our cultural annihilation is largely unconscious, unchosen. But again the resulting condition is the same - although the survival value of this change may be even more questionable and doomed than it was for Dracula. For the picture that emerges of this self is far from reassuring.
Psychologist Paul Verhaeghe (2011), mirroring Cushman, remarks that the most common problems he encounters has shifted fundamentally from his disciplines beginning. There is now in many patients, he says:
an inadequate potential to symbolise, to work through something, to put something into words... You then have to deal with, as it were, meaningless symptoms... and you have people that cannot express it — whatever ‘it’ may be… The classic group of psychoneurosis suffer from an excess of meaning, an excess of history, an excess of the imaginary, and this you have to deconstruct. With the new group there is a lack on all these levels. They do not trust the other. If there is transference, it is negative transference. They hardly have the potential for symbolizing. They hardly have a history. They have a history, but they cannot verbalize that history.
He goes on to note that “One can hardly imagine the combination of inner emptiness and anxiety that some people have”.
So on the one hand you have Dracula as he has emerged in the popular consciousness as seductive figure, but also in the book as tragic, ahistorical, a-cultural figure. On the one hand you have the modern self as it wants to be, and on the other you have the modern self as it is. Dracula embodies both - fantasy and nightmare. But, like the empty self, the latter version of Dracula has been swept under the rug, or alternatively glossed over. Perhaps because he foretells a fate we’d prefer to avert our eyes from.