We ask none to believe us! - the last page of Dracula

That last page of Dracula.  A little epilogue by Jonathan Harker. Four paragraphs.

I was joking, kind of, about the novel as a polyamorist tract. But the first new piece of information we get is that Harker and Mina have a son "whose bundle of names links all our little band together."  Huh.  So he's everyone's son.  Somehow.

The next paragraph brings back the travel-writing theme, which I haven't mentioned before.  Transylvania is once again safe for Baedeker.  "Every trace of all that had been was blotted out." 

Well, almost every trace.  Because the third and longest paragraph is all about - I can hardly believe it - the paperwork, the "mass of material," "nothing but a mass of typewriting."  Harker worries that there is "hardly one authentic document," no proof of anything.

But sweet old Uncle Van Helsing ends the book with this:

"We want no proofs. We ask none to believe us! This boy will some day know what a brave and gallant woman his mother is. Already he knows her sweetness and loving care. Later on he will understand how some men so loved her, that they did dare much for her sake."

This is where Stoker wants us to stop - back with strong Mina and her courtly knights.  Mina's story is important for the future.  The whole business with the supernatural monster is important only as a part of that story.  Is this a clue to the book's meaning?

Last pages can be dangerous.  To the reader pursuing the transgressive Dracula, the epilogue might look like a travesty, maybe a deliberate travesty, a mockery of the real meaning of the book.  The subconscious sexual predator in us all, or the fear of the unknown, or whatever it is that makes the novel psychologically effective.  Or does Stoker mean it all - the enemy is, or can be, crushed, after which we're all safe and happy.

I have no idea. It's a strange book, not strange in the way I had expected (uncanny weirdness), but slippery, hard to interpret. The ending is just one more puzzle. I'm more comfortable with the straightforward ambiguty of the ending of Frankenstein, which is a culmination of the meaning of the book, not a reversal:

He sprang from the cabin window as he said this, upon the ice raft which lay close to the vessel. He was soon borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance.

Technology and information theory in Dracula - what's the (secondary) point of this book?

In Dracula, Bram Stoker created a character and a set of images that are greater than the actual book they appear in, a feat neither small nor common.  I know, there were vampire stories before Dracula.  Goethe did not create Faust; Mozart did not create Don Juan. 

So what else does Dracula do?  I'm having a little more trouble there.  I think that's the question at the heart of Prof. Maitzen's ethical protest: "Isn’t it a shame to take this ability and use it in the service of something as prurient as this novel, as dedicated as this novel is (so far) to the cheap thrill of waiting to see how bad things will get?"*  What, though, if Stoker has something else in mind?

Some candidates:

1. A celebration of polyamory.  Count Dracula has his three vampire consorts.  Lucy Westenra receives proposals from three suitors on the same day, and later receives blood transfusions from all three, and also from Dr. Van Helsing.  Later our brave heroes all devote themselves to Mina Harker and make various pledges of undying loyalty.  Mina is married, but her husband's spirit has been destroyed by Dracula, allowing the other men to feed off of the indomitable strength of his wife.  All of this is undone on the very last page.  How much weight should a reader put on the last page of a novel?  Oops, I forgot Dracula.  Lucy and Mina also symbolically marry Dracula.

That one doesn't make me feel any better about this book. Let's try another.

2. A celebration of technological progress.  The tools that defeat the vampire include: the telegraph, the dictaphone, the typewriter, Winchester rifles, steamships, the railroad, and the telephone.  Property rights and the rule of law perhaps also play a part.  Also, in a particularly silly scene, a dog whistle.  Some sort of argument is being made about the primacy of technology and science, a curious thing to find in a book about a supernatural menace.  Dracula is defeated by the application of the scientific method to supernatural phenomena.  Van Helsing and Mina, in particular, are rational and open-minded.  The learn the rules and apply them.  Science will presumably catch up eventually.

I was hoping Stoker was going to do something genuinely interesting with these ideas, but I don't see it.  The rules for defeating vampires includes consecrated Hosts and crosses and whatnot.  Does this challenge our ideas of science or not?  It does explain how the Dracula-as-disease metaphor works so well.

3. One more, a related one.  A demonstrarion of the value of information.  All of that typing and filing has a point.**  Dracula is defeated by the dissemination of information.  Stoker makes this point clear in the plot when, after everyone shares all available information via Mina's secretarial work, the men immediately conspire to conceal information from her, to protect her delicate womanhood or some such idiocy.  They almost get her killed.  Lesson learned: after this, all data is shared.  Mina's telepathic link with Dracula is related, somehow.

H.P. Lovecraft's stories generally make the opposite argument. Additional information causes insanity and death. One is best off not knowing about the screaming chaos at the center of the universe.  In Dracula, knowledge leads to victory.  Stoker is an early prophet of the information economy.

I've come up with some fine, fine nonsense here. Maybe one more day on Dracula. That last page is still bugging me.

*  Note that Rohan is taking for granted Stoker's skill as a writer.  Me too.  Dracula, the prose of Dracula, ranges from pretty good to pretty great, with a lot of the pretty great concentrated in the first quarter or so. A famous bit of Chapter 2:

There seemed a strange stillness over everything. But as I listened, I heard as if from down below in the valley the howling of many wolves. The Count's eyes gleamed, and he said:-

"Listen to them, the children of the night. What music they make!" Seeing, I suppose, some expression in my face strange to him, he added, "Ah, sir, you dwellers in the city cannot enter into the feelings of the hunter."

You have a way to improve that? Dracula is only rarely uncanny.

** But see here, where all of the typing and collating and meetings are interpreted as a budding creative writing program, allowing the characters to express their "passion" for "storytelling," which they share with Stoker, and the author of the post.

I used manifold, and so took three copies of the diary - a properly filed Dracula

Typing in triplicate!  Pretty scary stuff!  From Chapter 17 of Dracula (1897).

Dracula consists of documents.  Diaries and letters, with the occasional newspaper clipping thrown in, strung together in chronological order. One clever result is that the reader always knows more than the characters, for most of the book, at least.  Until heroic Mina Harker, exemplar of modern womanhood, master of the sciences of shorthand and typing, gathers together all of the relevant materials and - sensitive readers should look away - types them up.  In triplicate.  And then she collates them.  Stoker neglects to mention her use of color-coded mini-PostIt notes, or what binderization system she employs.  Then the vampire-hunters have a meeting in a conference room.  Mina takes minutes, which she later types and distributes.

For many readers, this will be the most terrifying scene in Dracula.  Look at that primitive technology. Only three copies for six characters. They do not each get their own takeaway. They have to share.

So the next thing that happens in the actual plot of the book about vampires is that everyone reads the big pile of documents, the same documents that the reader has already gone through, Chapters 1 through 16 of Dracula. By lining up the dates of the different diaries, various discoveries (which the reader already knows) are made which help move the plot forward.  Count Dracula, understanding that this paperwork is a wood-pulp stake aimed directly at his heart, invades the office and throws it all into the fire. 

Here I interrupted. "Thank God there is the other copy in the safe!" (Ch. 21)

Sometimes Dracula is kind of a stupid book.  I haven't even mentioned the scene where the heroes hire a locksmith.  I promise, kids, next week's movie will be really scary.

By the time Stoker wrote Dracula, the novel-of-documents was an old device. Rarely, though, do the documents themselves play such a direct role in the story.  Samuel Richardson got caught up in the same thing in Pamela (1740), where poor kidnapped Pamela often seems more worried about her supply of paper and pens than escaping her kidnapper.  And I now remember that Robinson Crusoe "could not make any ink by any means that I could devise" (Ch. 4).  Mostly, though, authors set up the "actual document" premise and then discreetly ignore it.  Not Bram Stoker.

Tomorrow, I'll take a useless stab at figuring out what this book is good for.