Cuadecuc, Vampir is probably the most provoking adaptation of Dracula you have never seen, for it is vanishingly rare. The film was directed in 1971 by Pere Portabella, the legendary Spanish producer of scandalous films by Luis Bunuel, a documentarist in his own right and later a leading Catalan politician. It is a strange collection of scratchy, black-and-white footage taken on the set of Jess Franco’s Count Dracula (1970), an Italian-Spanish-German production that – like many Hammer House of Horror films – starred Christopher Lee as the aristocratic vampire. In Cuadecuc, however, instead of lurid Technicolor melodrama, Portabella’s camera keeps drifting beyond the staged action to reveal stage-hands tinkering with smoke machines, spraying cob-webs on cardboard tombs, tensing the guide wires for very unconvincing rubber bats, or catching Lee in make-up, out of character, laughing and joking as he slips on his wig. The soundtrack is a dissonant avant-garde composition by Carles Santos, full of industrial noise, gratings and grindings, which further alienates the viewer from the action. The film ends with Lee reading out the last page of Stoker’s novel, the scene of Dracula’s death (his own character’s death), yet even here the camera stays rolling slightly too long, and an awkward silence stretches out before the director eventually shouts ‘Cut!’
Cuadecuc, Vampir was shown at the Cannes film festival to acclaim but was immediately banned in Spain. Although there is nothing explicitly stated, the Fascist authorities that tightly controlled cultural expression in Spain under the dictatorship of General Franco got the message loud and clear. Count Dracula is meant to represent the undead dictator Franco, but Portabella’s strategy is to show Count Dracula as a flimsy Gothic concoction, his camera revealing the simple devices that create the illusion of power, fear and Mesmeric control. He is pulling away the curtain, just like the end of The Wizard of Oz.
Why start here? Because Bram Stoker’s Dracula is rarely approached except through the myriad adaptations, transpositions and revisions of the novel since it was first published in 1897. Portabella’s meta-film, a film of images appropriated from another, amplifies this filtering effect. We come at Dracula as if it were always already ‘found footage’. We somehow already know the arbitrary rules of vampirism and how to protect ourselves against it, we come decked out with crucifixes and garlic flowers, and we know the narrative arc of this story, from margin to centre and back again. Florence Stoker, Bram’s widow, attempted to use the courts to stop the circulation of F. W. Murnau’s masterpiece, Nosferatu (1922) for breach of her husband’s copyright, but by 1932 she accepted a deal with Universal Studios when they hired Bela Lugosi to repeat his stage success in Dracula. The text, already a success in popular editions and on stage, has since been in unceasing circulation. It wandered so wide and far, that Francis Ford Coppola’s hugely successful adaptation in the 1990s was called Bram Stoker’s Dracula, as if it was a novelty to plan a return to the originating text itself.
Dracula is what Chris Baldick has called a modern myth, like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) or Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Jekyll and Hyde (1886), a text that is open to all kinds of adaptation but that carries a basic set of narrative structures and meanings, even through the worst translation.1 Dracula speaks very specifically to the heady world of fin-de-siècle London in the year of Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee, but it also offers allegorical potential to a sclerotic Spain in the last years of Franco’s dictatorship. The myth-structure of the arrival of an insidious, alluring vampire carrying a deadly contagion that threatens modernity itself but is fought off – just about – by an improvised Praetorian guard, has since found vectors around the world and embedded itself in all kinds of surprising local contexts (some of which Ken Gelder explores in his chapter below).
Yet rather than merely saying that Stoker taps into the mythopoeic – primitive or archetypal stubs of storytelling that prove easy to repeat and transmute – Cuadecuc, Vampir reinforces the lesson that Dracula is always thoroughly political and context-specific. Indeed, as Nick Groom details in the opening chapter here, the word ‘vampire’ enters the English language in the 1730s as a satirical political metaphor long before it appears in fiction. Never mind the strange peasant stories of buried bodies that refuse to die and come back to feast on their neighbours, stories that were being reported from the very edges of civilised Europe in confused accounts hailing from the bloody Balkans. The ‘Riflers of the Kingdom’ in London or Paris were the merchants, bankers and politicians who were regularly termed blood-suckers or vampires in the vibrant pages of the disputatious newspaper press of the emergent bourgeois public sphere. The vampire was a mobile metaphor long before Stoker picked up and transformed William Polidori’s portrait of the demonic aristocrat Lord Ruthven in his short Gothic tale, ‘The Vampyre’ (1819).
To study Bram Stoker’s Dracula, then, requires a number of long perspectives, from before and after its publication in 1897. A reader needs a sense of the mobility of the vampire as folkloric term and agile metaphor in the 150 years before publication, in literature, folklore, anthropology and the geopolitics of Europe. But we also need a grasp of the renewed narrative energy and concentrated form Stoker gave the vampire that meant it could leap so effortlessly from text to stage to many different kinds of screen (film, TV, computer game) in the 120 years since its publication. This Companion aims to provide that long view in its opening and closing sections, which offer various pre-histories and subsequent cultural transformations of Stoker’s text. These longer perspectives are intrinsic to understanding what Stoker’s melodrama consolidated in its exuberant narrative form.
But we also have to address the specific puzzle of what Stoker did in Dracula that secured its astounding success as a modern myth. On publication, the book was regarded a cynical pot-boiler that was seeking slightly too hard to join what some newspapers denounced as the Culture of the Horrible, written by a hack writer better known for his management of the Lyceum Theatre under famous actor Henry Irving. Stoker’s Times obituary recognised that ‘he was the master of a particularly lurid and creepy kind of fiction, represented by “Dracula” and other novels’, but confidently predicted that ‘his chief literary memorial will be his Reminiscences of Irving’.2 This was the bid to secure a respectable place for Stoker in posterity, and was completely wrong.
In 1897, readers of contemporary fiction seemed to have been more willing to countenance Richard Marsh’s The Beetle, a thematically similar tale of London menaced by a supernaturally powerful foreign agent, or Florence Marryat’s tale of the psychological attenuation of her mixed-race protagonist in The Blood of the Vampire.
It is impossible to over-emphasise how culturally invisible popular fiction such as Dracula was to the formation of literary canons and the training of literary taste for much of the twentieth century. When David Punter wrote about Dracula in his pioneering survey The Literature of Terror in 1980, it was presented as an act of recovery of a novel he modestly suggests has been under-rated and largely forgotten under the welter of horror films that shared its name. There was a slight kerfuffle about literary value when it was announced Dracula would be included in the Oxford World’s Classics series for the first time in 1983. Dracula was not helped along by any intrinsic literary merit, the critical consensus seemed to say, but this actually allowed the Dracula myth to escape the confines of its routine, entirely adequate text.
Yet the form of Dracula has something to do with its posthumous revival, an ingenious construction of different kinds of textual fragments, diaries, newspaper reports, phonographic transcriptions, log books and other data. Within the text, that modern girl Mina Harker (who sometimes calls herself a New Woman) emerges as the organising secretary who creates, shuffles and organises this ‘mass of typewriting’ (D, 351), reducing diverse details into equivalent informational bits that can be sorted by the hapless men around her. Mina is a kind of embodied search-engine herself, with sailing times and train timetables at her fingertips. She even becomes a kind of occult communication device herself, a new-fangled two-legged telephone, able to dial up the Count from afar once she is in mesmeric rapport. She sends in weather updates, travel reports, and neatly summarises scientific findings on the ‘criminal mind’. It is having more efficient information systems than the Count that in the end defeats the vampire threat. In contrast, Dracula relies on blue books and civil lists in his mouldering library to learn the institutional contours of the British state he sets out to infiltrate. ‘Vampirism is a chain reaction, and can therefore only be fought with the techniques of mechanical text reproduction’, Friedrich Kittler observes. The novel is therefore, in his reading, ‘the written account of our bureaucratisation’.3
This device of constructing narrative through fictitious assemblage was borrowed from Wilkie Collins’s sensation fictions of the 1860s, but it is greatly amplified by Stoker, and turns Dracula into a breathless rendition of modernity itself, racing on with the whizz of trains and omnibuses, of letters and telegrams speeding through wires or voices caught in real time on wax cylinders. It might have felt crude and vulgar to cultivated aesthetic taste in the 1890s, but it makes Dracula part of the new century, not the old.
This narrative structure of informational bits also makes the novel seem – to switch analogy – like an open grid, built from tiles of a mosaic that can be shuffled and re-shuffled into new pictures over and over again. Judith Halberstam, in resisting the temptation to produce a single key or code to unlock the novel, instead called it ‘technology of monstrosity’, a machine that works to ‘produce the monster as a remarkably mobile, permeable and infinitely interpretable body’.4 This is a reflection of the whole libraries of critical work that has now grown up around Dracula. If it sometimes feels like a generative machine for criticism, that is because the novel is so informationally dense, taking on the rich colourings of many artistic, cultural, political, social and scientific discourses that swirled anxiously through the public sphere in the 1890s.
Dracula was published in London at a period of intense contradictions in 1897. Queen Victoria headed an empire that finally had belligerent ideological spokesmen advocating greater expansion (the ‘Jingos’), but was also riven with fears of attack, over-extension and the massing of rival power in Germany, Russia and America. The economic engine of the British industrial revolution that had powered Britain to world leadership was seriously stalling. The uneasy truce between Capital and Labour seemed to be fraying, with the unemployed sleeping in numbers in London squares, unions gaining power in the coal industry and calling workers out on strike, the formation of Socialist political parties, and demonstrations bursting into riots in Trafalgar Square. Women demanded increasing political representation and legal rights, with any advances always accompanied by a conservative counter-discourse of imminent sexual anarchy and race suicide. The great liberal tradition of England as a sanctuary of tolerance from religious persecution was still upheld, yet the influx of Jews to the East End escaping from the Russian pogroms caused much anxiety and new controls over the entry of immigrants. A pseudo-scientific discourse of the hierarchy of the races hardened. Some from the more bestial races, Russian Nihilists and Irish revolutionaries demanding home rule for Ireland, haunted the city streets as bomb-throwing monsters threatening the domestic security of the heart of the Empire. Invasion narratives, just like Dracula, were written in their hundreds.
Scientific and technological discoveries related to the second great industrial revolution – the electrical one – seemed to reinvent the possibilities of everyday life. There were new communication technologies, wireless telegraphy and mysterious Hertzian waves, a new psychology revealing the depths of the ‘subliminal mind’, a new physics of ‘dark matter’ and invisible radiation, a new biology of nerves and synapses. The co-discoverer of evolutionary theory, Alfred Russell Wallace, declared it The Wonderful Century in 1898. Yet men of science also seemed overcome with pessimistic accounts of decline and collapse. At the end of his life, T. H. Huxley’s lecture, ‘Evolution and Ethics’ (1893), seemed to indicate that the advances of civilisation were now in conflict with basic biological imperatives. An upstart young journalist, H. G. Wells, used his brand new type of education in science under Huxley to repeatedly imagine the end of the world in The Time Machine (1895) or The War of the Worlds (1898).
Cultural frontiers of freedom of expression had been pushed back by aesthetes and Decadents and by a new popular press, yet the conservative establishment viciously countered with the arrest and imprisonment of campaigning journalist W. T. Stead for publishing about child prostitution in London in 1885 and Oscar Wilde in 1895. The leading light of the Decadents was sentenced to two-years hard labour for acts of gross indecency with young men in London hotels. Stoker knew Stead in London, and had been Wilde’s neighbour in Dublin, a long-time visitor as a young man to the salons held by Sir William and Lady Wilde. The Dublin beauty Florence Balcombe turned down Wilde’s proposal and married Stoker instead. Some speculate on the shadow Wilde cast over Dracula, a text largely composed while Wilde’s health was being determinedly broken on the treadmills of Reading Gaol. Stoker was a social and political conservative, an Irishman in the colonial centre, but who lived in very liberal journalistic and bohemian circles of London’s literary and theatrical culture. He was perfectly positioned to experience the full torque of these many over-lapping contradictory forces of advance and counter-reaction. Stoker is not necessarily in control of these forces, even as they surface through his headlong prose.
The core work of this Companion is to provide a series of routes through the text. Dracula is such an open matrix of a novel that the reader can take many different kinds of pathway through it, taking routes that sometimes reinforce each other, but at others appear never quite to intersect and indeed even contradict each other. That is the product of its feverish over-determination, its openness to history. Hence in this Companion, once Nick Groom, William Hughes and Alex Warwick have set Dracula in relation to the capacious tradition of the Gothic romance, a sequence of essays focus narrowly on the novel’s relationships to specific discourses. Christine Ferguson explores Dracula’s relationship with the late Victorian occult revival, which wanted to reshape the relationship of modernity to the ‘supernatural’, just as the novel does. Roger Luckhurst examines how the novel lies on the cusp of shifting paradigms of self and subjectivity in psychology, just as Heike Bauer relates how closely interwoven the vision of the polymorphous vampire is with a new language of sexuality and sexual perversion. Popular genres were intrinsically part of the scientific and cultural work of defining the boundaries of the normal and the pathological.
It is crucial to be aware of the investments Dracula has in discourses about race in the late Victorian period, and so David Glover explains the anxious discourse about the effect of mass migration to the imperial metropolis, while Matthew Gibson teases out the complex meanings Western Europe assigned to the Balkans and Transylvania in particular at this time. As the Count explains his origins in the whirlpool of races in his passionate speeches to Jonathan Harker at the start of the novel, this region existed on the very edge of Christian Europe, a blurred border zone where European civilisation met the Ottoman Empire, a rival power and a rival religion centred in Constantinople (now Istanbul). Anthony Bale details how Dracula is underpinned by what the symbolics of blood, the bearer of sacred meanings in the Christian tradition but also the focus for centuries of fantasies of contamination and desecration by that race of perennial outsiders/insiders, the Jews. The monstrosity of Dracula, the contagion of vampirism, is in uncomfortable proximity to these ancient and modern discourses of race.
In this section of contexts, Carol Senf also makes us aware of how the novel embodies contradictory notions of gender and sexuality in the pairing of Lucy Westenra and Mina Harker, at once liberated New Women and the antipathy of that liberation in the course of the plot.
It was in the millennial angst of the 1980s and 1990s that there was a revival of interest in the last century’s fin de siècle, a revival that buoyed up the interest in Stoker’s novel. There have been many readings of Dracula in relation to Karl Marx’s famous metaphor of capital sucking the life-blood from dead labour: Franco Moretti’s remains the most often read, although there are many others.5 But in the 1990s, identity politics dominated critical accounts of Dracula, the sense that the novel had to be explored through the identity categories of class, race and gender. An emergent critical language in this period was Queer Theory, which found a rich seam to explore dissident sexualities in the late Victorian era, because this was exactly the era when (as Heike Bauer details) the notion of homosexuality and heterosexuality were formulated. The Gothic was an exemplary genre for expressing ambivalence about sexualities that were just on the threshold of being enunciated. Dracula staunchly defends the northern Protestant Christian family and the sacred duties of motherhood, blasting the monstrous alternative represented by the Count. Yet it also indulges in precisely these fantasies of alternative vampire sexuality and non-reproductive pleasures, imagining them into existence in impressively hallucinated scenes. All the men in Dracula, somewhat camply, faint away at some point or other, like Gothic maidens overwhelmed by feelings that they cannot master.
This is why Queer Theory introduces the ‘New Directions’ section, since Dracula has only very belatedly come to be read in this context. Nor is this a stable, singular body of work: Xavier Aldana Reyes might be considered a second-generation Queer theorist, striving to keep the dynamic matrix of the text open to multiple possibilities, rather than trying to uncover a ‘homosexual’ secret buried or encoded in the text.
Dracula keeps on opening new pathways and directions. Part of the task of the new Horror Theory associated with object-oriented ontology is to displace familiar theoretical frameworks that have so often worked through ‘depth reading’, the phenomenology of literary interpretation that dominated the twentieth century. Mark Blacklock explores how much Dracula can be read as part of the revenge of the object world on the deluded subjects who thought they were in command, the vampire a figure of radical non-subjectivity, morphing as mist, or fog or rats. If this is a new approach, so is Ken Gelder’s attention to transnational and transmedial translations of the Dracula narrative across the ‘Southern Gothic’ in America, in Japan and in Sweden. Like a hybrid plant, Dracula flowers with strange new blooms when transplanted to different cultural ecologies.
The enduring force of Dracula is the seeming inexhaustibility of the contexts it requires and the readings it might generate. Lack of space has squeezed out a particular focus on Stoker’s place in the Anglo-Irish Gothic, although there is lots of work available elsewhere on this.6 Emergent paradigms like medical humanities inevitably re-imagines Dracula as a contagion narrative, perfectly fitting the paradigm of the lone ‘typhoid Mary’ that arrives as an advent of an epidemic.7 The Companion might have stretched its already detailed accounts of adaptations of stage, film and TV to include comics or computer games. The further reading at the end of this Companion will help consolidate established paradigms, but also indicate emergent readings too. The tiles of this mosaic will keep being re-arranged. This is only testament to Dracula’s place in the pantheon of modern myths.
