March 8, 2021
When Modernity Fails: How Dracula Foretold the Great War
Before I say another word, here’s a disclaimer. Yes, the subtitle is somewhat misleading, albeit catchy. Bram Stoker’s Dracula didn’t quite foretell the Great War, that is WW1, in the sense it didn’t intend to. What happens in Dracula – and the reason this post exists – is that Stoker, reflecting the cultural milieu of the late 19th century, subconsciously included in his magnum opus the reasons why modernity fails. These reasons partly overlap with the reasons behind the Great War.
Perhaps what is more important in all this is that the reasons don’t seem to be all that different today. More than a hundred years later, modernity fails us again. Crucially, modernity fails us for the same reasons. We’re dealing with somewhat altered dynamics, of course, yet the basic ingredients are the same.
We’ll begin by taking a brief look at the historical context of Dracula – the cultural milieu I referred to. Then we’ll see how Stoker’s novel explains why modernity fails, and how that relates to the Great War.
Like every self-respecting Gothic work, Dracula hides a complex nexus of meaning. Blood-sucking vampires only form the skin layer, but the heart – no pun intended – of the novel contains a multitude of allegories, many of which are not the result of conscious authorial work.
Why Modernity Fails: Cutting Edge… Victorian Technology
In some exaggerated sense, much of Dracula reads like a contemporary brochure of technological achievements. Cameras, typewriters, phonograph recordings, telegrams, Winchester rifles, and every other kind of item that should have given the vampire hunters a clear competitive edge.
However, the denouement of the novel is a slap in the face of modernity, which fails to address issues and situations that are patently outside its reach.
Particularly, for all their ostensible technological superiority, Dracula’s hunters resort to hypnotism to track the vampire. It’s worth noting that hypnotism as a practice was already in decline in the fin de siècle period. In the third part of the novel, Mina Harker, in a hypnotic trance, reveals enough details for the men to pursue Dracula back to Transylvania.
In this kind of regression, Stoker – again, very likely subconsciously – attempts to resolve the complex, self-contradictory predicament that wants the two sides, Dracula and his hunters, occupying two neatly separated sides. Good and evil. Day and night. Englishmen and foreigners. Christianity versus paganism.
Or, modern and old-fashioned.
The problem is, Dracula isn’t quite as old-fashioned as the novel would have him appear.
The… Postmodern Dracula
Let’s take a quick look at my post “The Modernity of Dracula”, particularly the excerpt where I talked about Count Dracula’s 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, Rhonda K. Rising Star: Dandyism, Gender, and Performance in the Fin De Siècle. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. p3. My emphasis.
In any Gothic work that respects itself, the vampire is a characteristically solitary figure. Unlike zombies which are a mass – and I’ll let you figure out the parallelisms here, involving mindless consumerism – the vampire is a symbol of resistance against complacency and mediocrity.
In a way, the vampire is a symbol of resistance against “modernity”.
Let’s now revisit my post on Only Lovers Left Alive, and what I said there about the vampire couple:
Humans are painted in mostly dystopic tints, referred to as “zombies” by the philosophically and artistically savvy vampire pair.
[…]
Much like [a dandy] Adam is appalled in realizing his temporal displacement. Having influenced great historic figures, having discoursed with the greatest names in history – being still friends with a vampire Christopher Marlowe – he is now surrounded by mediocrity and servile “zombies”.
At the end of Dracula, the eponymous character is apparently Or… is he? Take a look at this answer I’ve offered. destroyed. The bourgeois normality has return, and with it the mentality of the mass, the groundless belief in modernity, the complacent notion that nothing can go wrong.
So, how do we go from this to the Great War? Let’s now visit Blackadder, one of my all-time favorite TV sitcoms to find out.
Complacency Leads to War
In the fourth season of Blackadder, taking place during World War 1, the character of Baldrick – a simple-minded but honest private – asks his captain how the war started. The answer is revealing.
— You see, Baldrick, in order to prevent war in Europe, two superblocks developed: us, the French and the Russians on one side, and the Germans and Austro-Hungary on the other. The idea was to have two vast opposing armies, each acting as the other’s deterrent. That way there could never be a war.
Private Baldrick points out that “this is sort of a war” though. To this, the cynical Captain Blackadder replies: “Yes, that’s right. You see, there was a tiny flaw in the plan: It was bollocks”.
The reasons behind the Great War far exceed the scope of this post. But focusing on Captain Blackadder’s response, the key ingredient is complacency.
Believe it or not, only a few years before the outbreak of World War 1, the prevalent opinion was that there could not be a war in Europe. Certainly not a major war, it was unthinkable.
The rationale?
Capitalism.
Norman Angell, in his 1909 The Great Illusion, argued that territorial expansion was unprofitable, with global capitalism having removed the risk of major wars. People generally believed that human civilization was beyond wars. The general impression was that wars were a thing of the past.
Modernity, in the form of either technology – which made weapons too horrific – or economics, created the sense that there could never be a war because it didn’t make sense. And, people thought, humans were no longer wild savages.
The rest, as they say, is history.
When Modernity Fails: From Dracula to MacDonald’s
This kind of complacency echoes in our times. As Anatole Kaletsky aptly adds, the idea that modernity would save Europe from a major war is “broadly analogous to the modern factoid that there has never been a war between two countries with a MacDonald’s outlet”.
In fact, one must stand in awe before the monstrosity of capitalism. After all, capitalism has managed to absorb war into its money-making system – just as long as we remember that capitalism is a method of redistributing resources. Indeed, Dracula itself is in many ways a novel about capitalist competition.
In other words, the money war brings to the military manufacturers are redistributed from money that would’ve gone to healthcare, education, and every other aspect of everyday life you care about. And let’s not even talk about the millions of lives lost or immiserated because of war.
Did Dracula foretell WW1? Not directly, perhaps. But it certainly explained why modernity fails, even unintentionally. It reflected a society that lead to “the war to end all wars”. Talking about “the great illusion”!
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You’ve got great points in here. Great ones indeed. I’ll start by insisting that capitalism is a mode of production and distribution, not just the latter, as the former invests people’s actual existence into alienation and all that jazz you know about.
Now, moving to Dracula, I’d like to add something Walter Benjamin noticed while commenting on Kafka with Brecht: modernity fails indeed, the hero of modernity is failure, so failing is very modern, failing is succeeding in modernity. Now, you see, the dialectics becomes a lot more complicated due to that. Dracula indeed loses because of the cutting edge technology the crew has, but there’s a gist to it that you’ve noticed on passing: hypnosis. Not only is modernity hypnotic – of all senses; in all senses: it fascinates, enchants, and reaches beyond conscious control –, but also the newer (modern) technologies (mainly new, industrial, (mass) media) do have an unconscious. That’s why not much after we have a dispute over mediums themselves: photography x impressionism and cubism, ready-made x art institutionalization, and so on and so forth.
Your comment on hypnosis is profoundly intriguing. I don’t recall having seen such an analysis of hypnosis in Dracula before – and I’ve read a lot of Gothic critics.
The closest that come to mind are a comment by West-Pavlov, noticing the atemporal, dreamlike essence of capital exchange (everything happens here-and-now), as well as a fantastic argument by Moretti suggesting the (American) character of Quincey Morris is also a vampire, in market antagonism with Dracula. Whereas Morris fails in the novel, Moretti argues, he will succeed in real life where Dracula failed: filling London (the synecdochical center of the world) with “demons”.