June 12, 2020
The Modernity of Dracula: Dialectics of Past and Future
Note: the following article on the modernity of Dracula is a modified excerpt (pp. 66-67, 145-147) from my doctoral dissertation, “Time is Everything with Him”: The Concept of the Eternal Now in Nineteenth-Century Gothic, which is available for free from the repository of the Tampere University Press. For a list of my other academic publications, presentations, etc. feel free to visit the relevant page on the main Home for Fiction website.
Perhaps one of the most interesting utterances in Dracula is Jonathan Harker’s “old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere ‘modernity’ cannot kill” (D 43). However, what Jonathan fails to realize is that the joke is on him:
Dracula awes because he is old, but within the vampire tradition, his very antiquity makes him new, detaching him from the progressive characters who track him… Jonathan Harker looks in his shaving mirror and sees no one beside him. In Jonathan’s mirror, the vampire has no more face than does Dickens’s Spirit of Christmas Future. In his blankness, his impersonality, his emphasis on sweeping new orders rather than insinuating intimacy, Dracula is the twentieth century he still haunts … [He is] less of a specter of an undead past than a harbinger of a world to come, a world that is our own. (Auerbach 1995, 63; emphasis in the original)
And so, several scholars connect Count Dracula with modernity, through the concept of the eternal now. Dracula, like other Gothic texts, presents a temporal model in which “[c]hronological time is … exploded, with time past, present and future losing their historical sequence and tending towards a suspension, an eternal present” (Jackson 1981, 47).
The Modernity of Dracula Is a Lack of Representation
Considering the connection between the eternal now and the sublime, we discover one interesting repercussion. Namely, that the eternal now alludes to a future beyond representation.
Indeed, time can be seen as a “paradoxical mixture of not-needing-to-be-discussed and not-being-able-to-be-discussed [that] constitutes a double subterfuge which is one of the most effective conspiracies of modernity” (West-Pavlov 2013, 5). When it comes to Dracula and modernity, Stacey Abbott offers a direct connection:
The modern vampire, from Dracula to present-day vampires… has consistently challenged its relationship to convention and tradition, gradually escaping the confines of time and space to become free of the association with the past… Charles Baudelaire described modernity as the here and now, a fleeting, intangible moment in time, co-existing with that which transcends time and space: the eternal … Georg Simmel equally defined modernity as the perception and experience of the present moment … [M]odernity becomes the act of living in the eternal present. (2007, 5)
Therefore, if the “here and now”, the basic building block of modernity, is ephemeral and insubstantial, giving its place to a new one in a never-ending motion of destruction and renewal, then modernity and modernism can be seen as a process where contradiction, conflict, and ambiguity thrive (Abbott 2007, 5), something that can be seen in Dracula as well.
This sublime, all-inclusive aspect of modernity is characteristic of Dracula, who inspires both fear and admiration, disgust and desire, and underlines the fundamental temporal side of the Gothic sublime.
Kodak Cameras and Vampires
According to Yu, Dracula’s most shocking attribute is “his uncanny modernity” (2006, 164–165), and even in the most basic technological dichotomies between the Count and the Crew of Light, there are enough common elements to nullify the effect of modernity being on the side of Van Helsing and his party.
They use the telegraph to bridge the distances, when Dracula can mesmerize; they have Kodak cameras with film that does not like excessive light, much like Dracula – a fact that renders the vampire “the very emblem of cinematic production” (Kujundžić 2005, 93).
In particular, Abbott’s reference to Baudelaire and modernity becomes perhaps surprisingly relevant to Dracula and the historical context of the novel, as it reveals one additional facet of the mysterious figure of the Count: his status as a dandy.
The Modernity of Dracula through His Status as a Dandy
Dandyism can be seen as “the performance of a highly stylized, painstakingly constructed self, a solipsistic social icon … [A] man whose goal was to create an effect, bring about an event, or provoke reaction in others through the suppression of the ‘natural’” (Garelick 1998, 3).
Considering that Baudelaire himself thought that the true subject of modernism is the hero (Benjamin 1983, 74) and that the figure of the hero is a dandy (Benjamin 1983, 96), it becomes easy to see the connection between Dracula, dandyism, and modernism.
In fact, Baudelaire offers another crucial detail, namely that the dandy is “a descendant of great ancestors… ‘[T]he last shimmer of the heroic in times of decadence’” (Benjamin 1983, 96) – a description that is virtually identical to Dracula’s long talk about his own proud ancestors (D 35–37) and his disappointment at the present time of “dishonourable peace” (D 37).
Read more: Angelis, Christos. “Time is Everything with Him”: The Concept of the Eternal Now in Nineteenth-Century Gothic. Doctoral Dissertation. Tampere, Finland: Tampere University Press, 2017. Available from the repository of the Tampere University Press.
Works Cited
Abbott, Stacey. Celluloid Vampires: Life after Death in the Modern World. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007.
Auerbach, Nina. Our Vampires, Ourselves. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Benjamin, Walter. Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. Translated by Harry Zohn. London: Verso, 1983.
Garelick, Rhonda K. Rising Star: Dandyism, Gender, and Performance in the Fin De Siècle. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998.
Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. London: Methuen, 1981.
Kujundžić, Dragan. “vEmpire, Glocalization, and the Melancholia of the Sovereign”. Comparatist: Journal of the Southern Comparative Literature Association. 29 (2005): 82–100.
Stoker, Bram. Dracula. London: Penguin, 2003. Cited as D.
West-Pavlov, Russell. Temporalities. Oxon: Routledge, 2013.
Yu, Eric Kwan-Wai. “Productive Fear: Labor, Sexuality, and Mimicry in Bram Stoker’s Dracula”. Texas Studies in Literature and Language. 48.2 (2006): 145–170.
2 Comments
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I think to understand this aesthetic of disappearance that signifies Dracula’s own speculation (image, as reflected on a mirror), we must understand modernity’s (as an era) defining trait: the globalization of the capitalist mode of production.
Historically, modernity is the history of the world becoming “the globe”, that is, the unified marketplace for the smooth transit of commodities and the accumulation of capital.
Think France, as you’ve mentioned Baudelaire: they can trace a (fictitious) continuous lineage of writers (“poets”) from today back to Frankish Roman Empire, but what can I, a Latin American, do? My indigenous ancestors are still today considered uncivilized, I never heard a word about their lives, their history, on school, on classes, never read a single story of theirs (because they held it all in memory, in truly uninterrupted lineages of storytellers).
If you ever grab a textbook on Brazilian literary history, you’ll see the first “document” (they indeed use such a “genre”, avoiding admitting what the text actually is) of Brazilian “fiction” is a letter from a Portuguese explorer to the emperor describing how beautiful (if naked – oh good Jesus, a sin!) the land and the people are and how “planting everything, everything will bloom”. That’s a motherfucking political economical treaty, not a damn fictional text! It led to the massacre of the native population, the (almost) complete cleansing of their marks and signs and a whole prejudicious defining of their culture and their lives.
Truly the vanishing materiality of money as the universal mediator – but never constituting itself a medium, for time is the universal medium, time as measured by abstract social (average) labor, so a time that is not even lived, experienced, but the time of life as commodity (production) itself – brings about the disappearance of modernity’s inherent violence.
I mean, look at modern (as in modernist) art. It’s all violent. The desire for breakthrough, which encompasses a certain logic of escaping the grasp of definitions (painters painting paintings that defied art theories as they were published, due to how close criticism and art production were as economical and social strata).
You see this de-materialization of capital alongside art even more explicit when you notice how the visual arts got progressively more abstract as the center shifted from Europe to the USA via Clement Greenberg’s “Avant-garde and kitsch”. As the center of art departed from the raw barbarism of WW2 and went into the heart of ever-faster galloping capitalism, it progressively lost any semblance of reality and of individuality and became just pure (geometrical) abstraction (very similar to the visual presentation of smartphone apps and social media).
I mean… Look at Kant. Modern philosopher to whom, lil’ twat!? He was racist like fuck knows. And I’m still waiting for the community of white (knights? men? light?) to figure out their universal ethics on me, for the police ain’t so fucking philosophical when your skin ain’t got the color of the categorical imperative.
Modernity for us non-moderns is a paradox. But not a whimsical, poetical, magical, undefinable paradox that moves the heart in unknown ways; rather it is a concrete, explicit, violent, piercing our flesh paradox. If I had to give it in images – a very Latin-American way of doing this, instead of using concepts, which are an European fetish – I’d say it is less the Faulkner of “The sound and the fury” and more the Faulkner of “Wild palms”.
This should suffice as enough food for thought, but I swear to you I could write some more pages on it.
I always immensely enjoy reading your comments, thanks a million for offering such fresh perspectives to the blog!