Who Is Dracula's Father?

by John Sutherland

  It is clear, in the last stages of the action, that Mina is a very special kind of victim. As a mark (literally) of her singularity, she has taken part in a gruesome bloodexchange ceremony with the count … It seems that, by taking back the blood which he earlier took from her, she has become one of a privileged caste of living victims – one who seems to have some of the powers of the Un-Dead while still alive. Mina manifestly has superhuman powers – a radar-like apprehension of where Dracula is, for example. She is ‘unclean’ – the Christian cross burns her skin like acid. Her teeth have become sharper, and she looks – from some angles – vampiric.

  There is, one deduces, an inner élite of ‘super vampires’ who circulate Dracula’s sacramental blood among themselves – true communicants in the horrible sect, and Mina is now one of them. It is only this small coterie which is immortal, we may speculate. The bulk of their victims are disposable nourishment – a kind of human blood-bank to be discarded when exhausted. Unfortunately, Stoker does not give us any clear warrant for this speculation, nor does he (as far as I can see) work it plausibly into his narrative.

  Since then, I am pleased to report, the puzzle seems to have been exercising other minds (prompted, it would seem, by a more recent wave of vampire stories, none of which deals with the issue any more satisfactorily than did Stoker). In frivolous answer to the conundrum the following jeu d’esprit appeared in the normally unfrivolous New Scientist, under the headline ‘Why Vampires Would Have a Population Problem’:*

  Colleagues in the New Scientist office suggest that there must be a high death rate caused by Slayers and other natural hazards, balancing out the high ‘birth’ rate or mortals converted by bites. Such a mechanism could be modelled using the classic Lotka-Volterra equations for predator-prey populations. Although, of course, vampires are capable of making prey out of their supposed predators.

  However, I think a more plausible explanation is the tendency for vampires to involve themselves in doomed love affairs with slightly dotty young women, causing them to spend centuries mooning around in crypts not getting much done. An extreme case of this was recently documented in a dumb emo teen movie.

  This would mean that new vampires were only produced at a very low rate, allowing the population to remain fairly stable.

  The Lotka-Volterra (I’ve checked, it’s real) equation explains the balances, and mutually supportive survival achieved in natural habitats between prey/predator species very elegantly. At least I think that is what it does. I can’t understand it, even as laid out by Wikipedia, one’s first point of call in such crises. Lotka-Volterra connects, we learn there, with the ‘Kolmogorov model, which is a more general framework [modelling] the dynamics of ecological systems with predator–prey interactions, competition, disease, and mutualism’.†

  It is, one concludes, very strange where an interest in Dracula ends you up in. Transylvania, Lotka-Volterra, the Kolmogorov model. At times this is not a novel for the simple-minded.

  * The article, dated March 2009, is credited to Michael Marshall.

  † Accessed June 2017.

  Coincidence, or something else?

  Does Dracula (fore)know that Carfax is within a short bat’s-flight from Dr Seward’s asylum, and his straitjacketed slave, Renfield? Or is it merely coincidence?

  Coincidence is common enough in Victorian literature. Many of its narratives could not run smoothly without it. The prime thinker about the phenomenon is Thomas Hardy, in his prose and poetry. In his best-known poem Britain constructs the world’s greatest sea-liner, the Titanic. Simultaneously, Nature builds an iceberg. How does it happen these two objects will meet? Coincidence? Or destiny?

  Hardy theorised the ubiquity of coincidence in human existence, and the world around us, as ‘immanent will’ – as outlined by his favourite philosopher, the arch-pessimist, Arthur Schopenhauer. The things around us have ingrained within them a drive, invisible to us, but destructive, mischievous or just downright contrary. They are programmed so that things turn out as they do. Coincidence is the proof of that.

  There is in Hardy’s universe no ‘transcendant’ entity (God, the Devil, or a crew of gods who play with us for their sport). That is mere myth. Most of us wrestle with what looks like immanence in our everyday lives. Things seem to have ‘a will of their own’. Think of Laurel and Hardy, struggling to get the piano down a flight of stairs. The piano has no intention of letting them do it. Bloody instrument. Or Basil Fawlty, for whom the world is an assemblage of things designed by some malign force to frustrate Basil Fawlty.

  I myself have a briefcase which maliciously hides things from me. (I can’t get rid of it – it’s a Tumi.) My crockery has an ingrained desire to hurl itself to the floor. And so on.

  Stoker, unlike Hardy, does not subscribe to the immanence view. He is a transcendentalist. In Stoker’s view of life, as expressed in Dracula, Satan and God are locked in a struggle to establish who is in charge. The world is their stake.* There is no question as to whose side the Count – a prize pupil in Satan’s Scholasticon – is on. He is Team Devil to the roots of his teeth. There is all to play for. It is a Manichaean struggle (to continue with the big words) with transcendent players and the final outcome uncertain. This is Stoker’s cosmogony.

  There is nothing merely coincidental about the conjunction of events in Dracula – Mina, Lucy, and the Count all coming together in the remote town of Whitby, for example. Dracula somehow foreknew the ladies would be there. It’s his design, Satan’s design.

  In his notes Stoker inscribed the following aphorism from Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici: ‘Many secrets there are in Nature of difficult discovery unto man, of easie knowledge unto Satan.’ Dracula has manifest access to this ‘easie knowledge’. It helps him; but it does not ensure victory.

  * In the Old Testament God and Satan embark on a wager, as to whether Job will sustain his belief, or succumb, after Satan does his worst. Neither supreme power knows what the outcome will be, apparently, any more than a gambler throwing dice.

  How ordinary a vampire is Count Dracula?

  In many ways, Count Dracula is a fairly run-of-the-mill vampire. He is humanoid, and can pass for one of us, even though, as Stoker’s notes record, he only weighs, intrinsically, a couple of ounces, imperial.

  He is, however, in one salient feature extraordinary. As Paul Barber reminds us, most European vampires were peasants and looked like peasants. They were often confused about what had happened to them. They were associated with infectious disease more often than exsanguination. Dracula is, whatever else you hold against him, classy. He could be your guest at the Athenaeum and not raise a patrician eyebrow.

  There have been many exotic variations in the vampire kind as memorialised in folklore and elaborated in horror and fantasy fiction. Some are too exotic for everyone’s taste. In the preface to his genre-bending sci-fi anthology Dangerous Visions (1967), Harlan Ellison, for example, recalls rejecting, with a shudder, a submitted story about a snot vampire. One’s glad he did.

  As Paul Barber reminds us, wherever human beings have formed societies they have imagined vampire co-habitants. But what human imagination has come up with is astonishingly diverse: a veritable Wunderkammer of vampiric oddity. Clive Leatherdale muses merrily on the theme:*

  In Asia, Chinese tales spoke of blood-sucking creatures that were green, covered with mould, and had a propensity to glow in the dark … [In India,] The hant-pare would cling leech-like to the open wound of an injured person; while the vetala resembled an old hag and would seek the blood of sleeping women – for some reason preferring them drunk or insane.

  Malaysia has an interesting variant:

  As the only apparatus indispensable to a vampire is a mouth and a stomach, the penangallen consisted of just a head, stomach, and dangling entrails. It would soar through the air to pursue its preferred victims: babies or women in labour … Brazilians refer to a jaracara which resembles a snake and enjoys a penchant for either the blood or the milk o
f breast feeding mothers.

  There is ‘Bulgarian [talk] of a creature having just one nostril, a boneless frame, and fungoid flesh’. Leatherdale’s jocularity is infectious. And by comparison with this menagerie Dracula strikes one as dull as ditchwater. A foreign count with teeth. Nothing special. Rather respectable, even.†

  * In Dracula: The Novel & the Legend (1993).

  † Those with any relish for more on this topic are directed to http://listverse.com/2013/10/30/10-truly-creepy-vampires-from-around-the-world/

  Is Van Helsing’s giant spider real?

  Van Helsing is as much a tall-tale teller as a scientist. But just how tall are those tales? Consider the following. The Dutch sage is in conversation with Seward, lecturing as usual:

  Do you know all the mystery of life and death? Do you know the altogether of comparative anatomy and can say wherefore the qualities of brutes are in some men, and not in others? Can you tell me why, when other spiders die small and soon, that one great spider lived for centuries in the tower of the old Spanish church and grew and grew, till, on descending, he could drink the oil of all the church lamps?

  The largest known spider, very rare, is Theraphosa blondi. It is known as the ‘Goliath’. It is also nicknamed ‘Bird-eater’. Its leg span can be a foot and its weight not far off half a pound. Rarely encountered by man, thank goodness, Goliath’s habitat is the remoter regions of South America. It is nocturnal and lives in damp, dark places. Its skin is venomous to the touch and its two-inch fangs can penetrate and kill. And do. Its enormous size enables it to devour snakes and small birds. It is eaten itself, as a delicacy, by locals; the flesh is described as ‘shrimp-like’.

  Dracula devotees, for whom no pebble is too small to look underneath, have tracked the source of Van Helsing’s ‘great spider’ to the Athenaeum magazine, 1821, and the following wonder-of-the-day paragraph:

  The sexton of the church of St Eustace, at Paris, amazed to find frequently a particular lamp extinct early, and yet the oil consumed only, sat up several nights to discover the cause. At length he detected that a spider of surprising size came down the cord to drink the oil. A still more extraordinary instance of the same kind occurred during the year 1751, in the Cathedral of Milan. A vast spider was observed there, which fed on the oil of the lamps … This spider, of four pounds weight, was sent to the Emperor of Austria, and placed in the Imperial Museum.

  Stoker misremembers (the spider is located in France and Italy, not Spain). But how, one wonders, did he come across the reference in the first place? It is easier to think how, once read, it stuck in his mind. The 4lb spider (eight Goliaths in weight) symbolises, particularly in Van Helsing’s erroneous version, the omnipresence of gluttonous Satan, even in the holiest places. The idea of this monster crawling out of crevices, down long ropes, in consecrated places to lap up holy oil, generates revulsion. The effect is deliberate, and tactical.

  The perimeter of late Victorian disgust was something novelists had to be careful about. The Victorian gag reflex was more sensitive than ours. Indeed, there are several areas in Dracula where Stoker must have pondered how gross he dare make the text. Where did that red line lie? And where did Stoker feel it was safe to cross it? There is a relevant memo in the surviving notes:

  (Mem leeches – attracted to Count D, and then repelled

  – develop idea)

  He did not develop this ‘mem’ or refer to it again in his notes. The only reference to leeches in the novel is the description of Dracula lying in his coffin, after a feast of blood, ‘like a filthy leech, exhausted with his repletion’.

  How would Stoker have ‘developed’ the idea? The mental image of a leech-encrusted Dracula turns the stomach (mine, anyway).

  To continue the revulsion theme, Renfield’s diet is not good for the reader’s gorge. He is a zoophagite. In a sense, so are most of us. Our mouths, as the Vegans righteously tell us, are the graves of living animals. Renfield’s mouth is worse. A beefsteak, medium rare, is distantly related to what homo sapiens lived on in the hunter gatherer era. It makes us feel distant human origins. Renfield’s diet identifies him as something less than human. In his notes Stoker calls him the ‘fly-eater’. As he moves by gobbling his way up the evolutionary ladder he eats the spiders who have eaten his flies. He is now on the arachnophage rung. He hopes to ascend, via birds which eat the insects, to a kitten which would eat the bird. Just like the little old lady in the nursery rhyme who swallowed a fly. Stoker may have toyed with the idea of Renfield as a felinophage, but pulled back at this point. He had reached the line. Crossing it would lead, by a few rungs, to cannibalism.

  One can digress to note that Renfield was not alone in his eating preferences. The zoophagites, some of them eminent zoologists, were well known Victorian clubs devoted to feasting on exotic or otherwise interesting animals.

  Occasionally there are catering experiments with insects. One can, for example, turn up web guides to the ‘best bug restaurants’ in New York. Grasshoppers modo mejicano, at The Black Ant, looks good. Renfield, however, eats his insects while still crawling, hopping and slithering. Uncooked. It is the life, not the calories he craves.

  His lust for the life-giving fluid is displayed in the scene in which he cuts Seward’s arm in a homicidal attack, and sups the spilled blood from the floor, before it loses its elan vital. He lifts his head, jaws dripping, to allude to scripture: ‘the blood is the life,’ he says.*

  Renfield’s transgressive appetite for blood is revealed only in this one, momentary, scene. Nonetheless, on the strength of it, Stoker’s maniac has become the one of the few characters in fiction who has donated his name to medicine.† There is a pleasantly owlish Wikipedia entry‡ on what is now called Renfield’s syndrome which I can’t resist quoting:

  Clinical vampirism, more commonly called Renfield’s syndrome or Renfield syndrome, is an obsession with drinking blood. The earliest formal presentation of clinical vampirism to appear in the psychiatric literature, with the psychoanalytic interpretation of two cases, was contributed by Richard L. Vanden Bergh and John F. Kelley in 1964. As the authors point out, brief and sporadic reports of blood-drinking behaviors associated with sexual pleasure have appeared in the psychiatric literature at least since 1892 with the work of Austrian forensic psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing.

  ‘At least since 1892’ is an arresting detail. But it’s not clear that Renfield, in 1897, suffers from Renfield’s syndrome. He is wholly asexual and would be of no interest to Krafft-Ebing. His vampiric appetite for blood is only shown in the one scene with Seward’s arm. Very disgusting it is but nonetheless a oneoff thing.

  More typical of the man is Renfield’s tidying up his cell for the arrival of Mina. Jack Seward is dictating to his trusty phonograph:

  ‘She is going through the house, and wants to see every one in it,’ I answered. ‘Oh, very well,’ he said; ‘let her come in, by all means; but just wait a minute till I tidy up the place.’ His method of tidying was peculiar: he simply swallowed all the flies and spiders in the boxes before I could stop him.

  It’s a darkly comic scene, if you can stomach it. Renfield obviously can.

  Renfield is routinely seen as an acolyte – a holy idiot, whose existence is service to and adoration of his ‘Lord and Master’. He has, one supposes, no more seen his Lord and Master than the average Christian has seen Christ in all his glory (yet). How Renfield has come by his reverential knowledge is a mystery.

  Hilary Mantel’s comments are obliquely enlightening on Renfield’s saintly devotion:

  Rudolph Bell’s 1985 book Holy Anorexia, on Italian saints, is especially rewarding for connoisseurs of the spiritually lurid. St Maria Maddalena dei Pazzi lay naked on thorns. Catherine of Siena drank pus from a cancerous sore. One confessor ordered Veronica Giuliani to kneel while a novice of the order kicked her in the mouth. Another ordered her to clean the walls and floor of her cell with her tongue; but even he thought it was going too far when she swallowed the spiders and
their webs.§

  Which brings us back to where we began – to the gobes mouches (fly gobblers), as they are called in French. Spiders crawl everywhere in Dracula. They are recorded scuttling over Lucy’s tomb: there are, if we dare think about it, flies feasting on her flesh within for them in turn to feast on.

  Stoker pioneered, among much else, the uses to which fantasy literature could put the disgusting – in detail and conception. It is something to admire: with a momentary shudder. When one thinks about it, a furtively enjoyable shudder.

  * Deuteronomy 12, prohibiting the consumption of blood, ‘for the blood is the life’.

  † The only other I can think of is Pickwick Syndrome, named after the sleepy fat boy in Dickens’s novel. It is more technically called Obesity Hypoventilation Syndrome.

  ‡ Accessed June 2017.

  § https://www.theguardian.com/society/2004/mar/04/mentalhealth.health

  Appendix: Dracula Digested

  by John Crace

  John Crace is the parliamentary sketch writer for the Guardian newspaper, for which he also writes the regular Digested Read feature. He is the author of several books including, with John Sutherland, the multi-volume The Incomplete Shakespeare.

  Journal of Jonathan Harker

  3 May–25 June: Wonderful meal in Buda-Pesth. (Note to self: go back to restaurant to get recipe for Mina.) Then went on to Transylvania to complete the property transaction for Count Dracula. The maps weren’t nearly as good as the British Ordnance Survey ones so I was fearful I might be a little lost. An old woman made the sign of the cross and started muttering something about vampires. (Note to self: must ask the Count about these superstitions.)