Dracula and Duty

This article was downloaded by: [Smajic, Srdjan] On: 20 February 2009 Access details: Access Details: [subscription number 908872575] Publisher Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Textual Practice Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713721880 Dracula and duty Srdjan Smaji a a Furman University, Online Publication Date: 01 February 2009 To cite this Article Smaji, Srdjan(2009)'Dracula and duty',Textual Practice,23:1,49 — 71 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/09502360802622284 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502360802622284 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. 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The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. Textual Practice 23(1), 2009, 49– 71 Srdjan Smajić Dracula and duty Downloaded By: [Smajic, Srdjan] At: 16:40 20 February 2009 The duty drive Reading Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a bit like watching a perverse puppet show – perverse not because the performance happens to include explicit sadomasochistic acts (whose perversity, in any case, is always debatable), but because the principal actors behave like sentient marionettes. Tugged this way and that by urges, impulses, and drives they are powerless to resist, they are nevertheless free to contemplate and disparage their willdeprived conditions, many of which cannot be blamed on vampirism. Vampiric blood-lust, we quickly discover, is just one of several forms of obsession and compulsion, abandon and dispossession, that drain the Crew of Light of free will and autonomous agency.1 Hysteria ranks high on this list of related ailments (Dracula’s men repeatedly succumb to hysteric fits that contemporary readers would have interpreted as feminizing), and which also includes somnambulism, hypnotic trance, and uncontrollable, mirthless laughter – Abraham Van Helsing’s personified ‘King Laugh’ is a despotic puppet-master who ‘choose no time of suitability’ and ‘make . . . all dance to the tune he play’.2 And while Freudian psychology, in its fledgling stage at the time of Dracula’s publication in 1897, would caution against hastily pathologizing the subject of powerful instincts and drives – or, for that matter, the subject who succumbs to another’s will and seductive influence – the Crew are quick to diagnose their loss of self-control as a form of madness, such as when they find themselves yielding to what, after Freud, is the most banal if also, analytically, most fertile of psychic drives: the ‘wicked, burning desire’, as Jonathan Harker deliciously describes it, to be ‘kiss[ed] . . . with those red lips’ (D, p. 42), whether vampiric or human, male or female.3 Desire is ‘wicked’ in Dracula not because its protagonists are incorrigible prudes (they are actually closer to something like closet libertines), but because to desire something or, more often, someone is to be caught off guard and forced into the role of a passive recipient of pleasurable Textual Practice ISSN 0950-236X print/ISSN 1470-1308 online # 2009 Taylor & Francis http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/09502360802622284 Downloaded By: [Smajic, Srdjan] At: 16:40 20 February 2009 Textual Practice sensations, as when Harker, in his erotic encounter with the vampiric trio of ‘weird sisters’ (D, p. 51), ‘close[s] [his] eyes in a languorous ecstacy and wait[s] – wait[s] with beating heart’ (D, p. 43) for the vampires to dentally penetrate (and, needless to say, symbolically castrate) him. Alternately, to give in to desire is to be driven to action that makes the marionette’s strings all the more apparent. ‘Then a wild desire took me’ (D, p. 53, my italics), Harker confides in his journal as he recounts being moved to attempt the dare-devil stunt of scaling the outer wall of Dracula’s castle to gain access to the Count’s room. Harker is there for the taking, available to be possessed not just by the sexually voracious vampire (‘he has a fearful hold upon me’ [D, p. 41], Harker writes) but also, from within, by a ‘wild desire’ that comes unbidden and compels the sedentary solicitor to perform acrobatic feats of strength and dexterity. Less than a page later in the same journal entry, as he considers the worst-case scenario of Dracula’s emigration to London (‘where, perhaps, for centuries to come [Dracula] might, amongst its teeming millions, satiate his lust for blood, and create a new and ever-widening circle of semi-demons to batten on the helpless’), Harker’s language attests to the incessant overlapping of madness and desire in himself and Dracula in general: ‘The very thought drove me mad. A terrible desire came upon me to rid the world of such a monster’ (D, pp. 53–54, my italics). The thought that nudges Harker over the brink of madness and that lingers, not insignificantly, on a dystopian future in which millions of autonomous English subjects are reduced to a passive human buffet, operates like a psychic switch, activating a desire that is ‘terrible’ not just because of what is now necessary to satisfy it (i.e. murder, euphemized as ‘riddance’), but also because of the desire’s disconcerting modus operandi: an urge that comes upon him in vampiric fashion, sucking him dry of free will and barring any rational deliberation on the matter.4 But overpowering sexual desires and aggressive urges, which in Dracula are finally indistinguishable, do not exhaust the novel’s repertoire of madness; they are merely the tip of the psycho-pathological iceberg. One might expect religious piety and bourgeois decorum, two pillars of nineteenth-century middle-class respectability, to operate as bulwarks against the characters’ obsession with sex and violence, and as discursive structures that keep in check the novel’s ecstatic proliferation of less-than-respectable narrative impulses. Yet it is precisely Dracula’s ethical discourse, centered around the idea of duty, in which we find ‘wild’ and ‘wicked’ desires repeatedly entertained, gratified, and sanctioned: justified not just as irresistible but, more provocatively, indispensable to the Crew’s altruistic pursuit of the ‘ultimate good’ (D, p. 275). To begin with, let us consider one of the novel’s more ecstatic episodes, the scene in which Lucy Westenra is devamped – and killed – and where the male exorcists are just as mad 50 Srdjan Smajić Dracula and duty Downloaded By: [Smajic, Srdjan] At: 16:40 20 February 2009 with as they are mad about ‘the foul Thing’ (D, p. 192) that Lucy has become: The Thing in the coffin writhed; and a hideous, blood-curdling screech came from the opened red lips. The body shook and quivered and twisted in wild contortions; the sharp white teeth champed together till the lips were cut, and the mouth was smeared with a crimson foam. But Arthur never faltered. He looked like a figure of Thor as his untrembling arm rose and fell, driving deeper and deeper the mercy-bearing stake, whilst blood from the pierced heart welled and spurted up around it. His face was set, and high duty seemed to shine through it; the sight of it gave us courage, so that our voices seemed to ring through the little vault. And then the writhing and quivering of the body became less, and the teeth ceased to champ, and the face to quiver. Finally it lay still. The terrible task was over. The hammer fell from Arthur’s hand. He reeled and would have fallen had we not caught him. The great drops of sweat sprang out on his forehead, and his breath came in broken gasps. It had indeed been an awful strain on him; and had he not been forced to his task by more than human considerations he could never have gone through with it. (D, p. 192, my italics). Anticipating the pornographic gore-fest of B-rate horror films (Dracula is a precursor to the ‘slasher’ filmic genre), this performance of ‘high duty’ looks uncannily like violent sexual intercourse, even gang rape, complete with ‘deeper and deeper’ penetration, ‘writhing and quivering’, spurting of blood and ‘great drops of sweat’, and post-coital gasping and reeling. Significantly, this scene of extreme violence is bracketed – and contained, sanitized, rationalized – by brief excursions into moral theory, which here takes the form of an argument about conflicting duties and the hierarchy of goods. Learning that Van Helsing has some rather gruesome post-mortem plans for the vamped Lucy, and afraid of compromising his ‘faith as a Christian’ (D, p. 182), Arthur Holmwood, Lucy’s fiancée, is for a moment uncertain whether he or Van Helsing is mad (thus implying that one, if not both, must be insane), and settles the question by invoking his sense of duty: ‘Are you mad that speak such things, or am I mad that listen to them? Don’t dare to think more of such a desecration; I shall not give my consent to anything you do. I have a duty to do in protecting her grave from outrage; and, by God, I shall do it!’ To which Van Helsing responds in like manner: ‘My Lord Godalming, I, too, have a duty to do, a duty to others, a duty to you, a duty to the dead; and, by God, I shall do it!’ (D, p. 184).5 Van Helsing’s all-encompassing ‘duty 51 Downloaded By: [Smajic, Srdjan] At: 16:40 20 February 2009 Textual Practice to others’ instantly trumps, and makes seem selfish by comparison, Holmwood’s more narrow, personal duty to protect his fiancée’s corpse from ‘outrage’. After Lucy is spectacularly converted (via staking, decapitation, and force-feeding with garlic) from ‘the devil’s Un-Dead’ to ‘God’s true dead, whose soul is with Him’, Van Helsing punctuates the moment by resurrecting the previous conversation: ‘We have learned to believe, all of us – is it not so? And since so, do we not see our duty? Yes! And do we not promise to go on to the bitter end?’ (D, p. 193). The pivotal question, ‘do we not see our duty?’, is meant to be rhetorical. Van Helsing assumes that the only possible answer is a resounding ‘Yes!’ But in so far as ‘our duty’, as the Crew here realize, is not singular but plural (one duty may be trumped by some higher, not immediately apparent obligation), there is plenty of room for deliberation and negotiation. In fact, the ethical thing to do, this scene suggests, is always to proceed with extreme caution; rashly jumping to do one duty might mean jumping over a superior one, and which becomes apparent as such only in retrospect. Yet since resistance to the siren call of duty in Stoker’s novel is futile because, as in the exemplary case of Lucy’s devamping, duty forces one’s hand rather than commands or, more weakly yet, instructs one to perform a particular action, Van Helsing’s question is indeed merely rhetorical. The Crew ‘see’ their duty because they cannot will themselves to look away from it, and to perceive it is to be compelled to execute it in automaton-like fashion.6 More troubling to the Crew’s conscience and sanity than the abrogation of a lesser duty (to prevent ‘desecration’ and ‘outrage’) in order to pursue a superior one (‘to others’) is the situation – which constitutes the core scandal of Dracula’s ethics – where one is rendered powerless to resist executing an action that paradoxically constitutes both the fulfillment and breach of the same ‘high duty’ (the highest of all in the novel’s hierarchy of moral obligations), namely always to act, as Van Helsing phrases it, ‘for the good of mankind, and for the honour and glory of God’ (D, p. 279). The inexorable duty drive, as I shall call it here, forces the Crew into an impossible position: they must do something they believe is at once absolutely right and absolutely wrong – embark on a vampire killing spree. It helps to think of vampires as less-than-human ‘semi-demons’ and ‘foul Thing[s]’, but such acts of discursive othering tend to collapse under the weight of the vampire’s undeniable humanity. When Harker spots the Count strolling the streets of London in broad daylight, he grants him human status without reservation: ‘It is the man himself!’ (D, p. 155). And not just any man but – and here I venture to propose a scandalous argument, yet one that I think is strongly implied by Stoker’s scandalous text – a man who is simultaneously God’s favorite and God’s enemy, a holy demon or unholy solider of God. Regardless of this complication, ‘the mercy-bearing stake’ must be buried in the 52 Downloaded By: [Smajic, Srdjan] At: 16:40 20 February 2009 Srdjan Smajić Dracula and duty vampiric body. The Count is as good as dead the moment the Crew’s relentless duty drive kicks in. Holmwood’s hand, ‘forced’ to its bloody ‘task by more than human considerations’, is a synecdoche for the automaton body of the duty-driven subject. If madness, as Dracula constructs it, is not just to lose control and succumb to irresistible impulses, but also to feel ‘as though [one’s] own brain were unhinged’ (D, p. 41) and, moreover, know it is unhinged, then the dutiful subject – fully aware of being unable to resist the call of duty – is the epitome of insanity. The ‘end’ which Van Helsing predicts will be ‘bitter’ to the Crew’s moral palate, smacks of divine and human injustice even as it constitutes the consummation of their duty to God and to those ‘teeming millions’ whose salvation hinges on the Crew doing the right thing. Much of the recent scholarship on Stoker’s novel treats it as a nexus of diverse yet interlocking contemporary discourses and ideologies, and a historically situated examination of Dracula’s ethics is no doubt possible. Such a reading might question how Stoker’s novel corroborates or complicates late-Victorian moral theories, and how these theories, in Dracula and contemporary culture at large, are inflected by, say, attitudes toward colonial subjects, anxieties about cultural degeneration and atavism, fear of crime and fear of the New Woman, and so on. Here, however, I wish to relieve Stoker’s novel for the moment from the burden of bearing historical testimony and instead read it as a critique of every gesture, whatever its political agenda may be, that seeks to ground moral theory in unequivocal binary logic, and as an invitation, still open to us today, to conceptualize the impulse to act dutifully as a form of madness – more precisely, as a discursive locus and psychological drive where the boundary between madness and sanity is erased. Dracula also demands that we recall and reconsider the ethical dimension of critical interpretation, the position from which we read, diagnose, and, implicitly or openly, pass moral judgment on this or that character and the novel itself. Stoker’s novel, I will argue, resists reductive treatments that classify the text and its Crew as xenophobic and chauvinistic, arrogant and intolerant. Instead, it calls for readings structured by oscillations between rather than ossifications of moral categories and critical judgments. If Dracula can be said to embody a moral imperative that solicits emulation, it is the impossible imperative simultaneously to commend and condemn the same action, the same character, the same text, and to do so madly, without reconciling incompatible demands. ‘Worser’ and ‘better’ parts Given that the pinnacle of the Crew’s ‘high duty’ is a series of bloody executions (Lucy, the three ‘weird sisters’, and finally Dracula) purportedly 53 Downloaded By: [Smajic, Srdjan] At: 16:40 20 February 2009 Textual Practice committed ‘for the good of mankind, and for the honour and glory of God’, one is tempted to propose that the vampire hunters, regardless of how sympathetically Dracula may treat them, act like a posse of deluded zealots and religious fanatics. Alternatively, and granting the Crew more autonomy in the matter, their repetition of the word duty strategically functions as a rallying war-cry and, after vampiric blood has been spilled, cleansing agent for a dirty conscience.7 Duty, as Ambrose Bierce cynically defines it in The Devil’s Dictionary, is ‘[t]hat which sternly impels us in the direction of profit, along the line of desire’.8 But one need not be overly cynical to suggest that, historically, every Crew of Light has needed to find – or, failing that, fabricate – an Axis of Evil against which to consolidate itself ideologically and tactically, using it as an occasion for military and politico-economic projects whose aggressive nature and self-serving agendas would be difficult to justify without the real or imaginary presence of an imminent threat to “sacred” values and ways of life. The persistence and effectiveness of such strategies on today’s political stage is surely too obvious to need extensive rehearsing. More efficiently than in Stoker’s time, ‘high duty’ is spun and marketed as that which must be done at all cost ‘for the sake of others’ (D, pp. 121, 153, 216), even if this means invading and occupying them – so as to exorcise (to borrow Mina’s language when she diagnoses the Count’s spiritual condition) their corrupt, polluted body politic, expel from it the ‘worser’ and set free the ‘better’ part: I know that you must fight – that you must destroy [Dracula] even as you destroyed the false Lucy so that the true Lucy might live hereafter; but it is not a work of hate. That poor soul who has wrought all this misery is the saddest case of all. Just think what will be his joy when he too is destroyed in his worser part that his better part may have spiritual immortality. You must be pitiful to him too, though it may not hold your hands from his destruction. (D, p. 269)9. Destruction and pity are presumably incompatible if directed at the same person or group of people. Unless, that is, violence can be presented as pity – as liberation rather than invasion, exorcism instead of execution – and the targeted individual or group imagined as split into two antagonistic halves, one of which (the ‘false’) must be destroyed for the sake of the (‘true’) other. ‘[B]utcher work’ (D, p. 320), as Van Helsing finally calls the act of devamping, is thus construable as a kind of medical intervention that, using a stake instead of a scalpel, removes a malign tumor (i.e. vampirism as a metaphor for tyranny, oppression, terrorism10). 54 Downloaded By: [Smajic, Srdjan] At: 16:40 20 February 2009 Srdjan Smajić Dracula and duty Dracula lends support to critiques of delusional or strategic misappropriation of religiously grounded moral imperatives by repeatedly injecting the Crew with the virus of doubt in the sanity and righteousness of their enterprise. The novel seems to recognize that the Crew are arrogant or deluded, and seems to want them to see this as well. On the one hand, the Crew are experts in diagnosing madmen and criminals – experts, that is, in distancing themselves from the pathology of violence and crime. The lunatic asylum director Seward discovers in his star patient Renfield a psycho-pathological goldmine: Renfield is ‘an undeveloped homicidal maniac’ (D, p. 70), ‘a zoophagous (life-eating) maniac’ (D, p. 71), and a ‘religious mania[c]’ (D, p. 96).11 Familiar with the foundational text of late-Victorian theories of degeneration, Cesare Lombroso’s Criminal Man (1876), as well as his disciple Max Nordau’s Degeneration (1892), Mina applies them as diagnostic manuals: ‘The Count is a criminal and of criminal type. Nordau and Lombroso would so classify him, and qua criminal he is of imperfectly formed mind’ (D, p. 296).12 On the other hand, however, the Crew realize that, as Shoshana Felman puts it, ‘to point to the madness of the other is to deny and to negate the very madness that might be lurking in the self’.13 ‘I am beginning to wonder’, Seward confesses in his journal, ‘if my long habit of life amongst the insane is beginning to tell upon my own brain’ (D, p. 124); ‘I sometimes think we must be all mad and that we shall wake to sanity in strait-waistcoats’ (D, p. 240). Trapped in Dracula’s castle, Harker prays to ‘God [to] preserve [his] sanity’, but fears that it may already be too late for that: ‘Whilst I live on here there is but one thing to hope for: that I may not go mad, if, indeed, I be not mad already’ (D, p. 41). Indeed, it is always too late. As Van Helsing advises Seward: ‘All men are mad in some way or the other; and inasmuch as you deal discreetly with your madmen, so deal with God’s madmen – the rest of the world’ (D, p. 111). Mina is particularly prone to unfavorable self-diagnoses. She classifies herself as ‘Unclean! Unclean! Even the Almighty shuns my polluted flesh! I must bear this mark of shame upon my forehead until the Judgment Day’ (D, p. 259). The pronouncement comes right after Van Helsing attempts to cleanse her from the pollution of vampiric blood by pressing a holy wafer to her forehead. Instead of working its magic, however, the wafer leaves a burn-mark which Mina reads as a symptom of spiritual uncleanliness, an unholy stigma.14 Van Helsing’s subsequent comment on Mina’s ‘Unclean’ condition, intended to allay her fears, is vexed by doubt about the divine sanction of the Crew’s pious, altruistic enterprise: It may be that you may have to bear that mark till God himself see fit, as He most surely shall on the Judgment Day to redress all wrongs of the earth and of His children that He has placed thereon. And oh, 55 Textual Practice Downloaded By: [Smajic, Srdjan] At: 16:40 20 February 2009 Madam Mina, my dear, my dear, may we who love you be there to see, when that red scar, the sign of God’s knowledge of what has been, shall pass away and leave your forehead as pure as the heart we know. For so surely as we live, that scar shall pass away when God sees right to lift the burden that is hard upon us. Till then we bear our Cross, as His Son did in obedience to His will. It may be that we are chosen instruments of His good pleasure, and that we ascend to His bidding as that other through stripes and shame; through tears and blood; through doubts and fears, and all that makes the difference between God and man. (D, p. 259, my italics). ‘[D]oubts and fears’ indeed. Van Helsing’s cautious qualifiers undermine his assurance that the Crew are doing God’s work – or that God’s work is clean work, an honest job. Mina may have to wait until Judgment Day to be cleansed (or she may have to spend some time in Purgatory); the Crew may be God’s ‘chosen instruments’ (or they may just be fooling themselves); wafer treatments don’t always work (or God may have good reasons for not cleansing and pardoning this particular servant). Such doubt is infectious. ‘There is something of a guiding purpose manifest throughout’, Harker later writes, ‘which is comforting’. But this confidence and comfort instantly evaporate: ‘Mina says that perhaps we are the instruments of ultimate good. It may be! I shall try to think as she does’ (D, pp. 274–75, my italics). Harker inadvertently admits that to ‘try to think’ that one is instrumental (and, more than that, the providentially guided instrument) in bringing about some ‘ultimate good’ is not the same as knowing or believing this to be the case. To try to think oneself into the position of one who possesses certain knowledge or unwavering faith is to confess not only that the attempt might fail, but that, even if it were to succeed, it would only be a poor substitute for the real thing. In fact, its success would prove only that one can talk oneself into believing virtually anything, even the most scandalous and illogical argument. Appropriately, Van Helsing’s central ‘thesis’, as he calls it (a version of the credo quia absurdum), is ‘[t]o believe in things that you cannot’ (D, p. 172). There thus appears to be a ‘better’ part of Dracula that confesses to its ideological sins, or can be made to confess to them; that struggles here and there to assert itself against its ‘worser’ double: bigoted, chauvinistic, xenophobic; ready to endorse violence if it serves some dubious ‘high duty’; intolerant and terrified of Otherness; a Dracula that manipulates religious discourse and twists the logic of altruism, duty, and sacrifice until it seems that the Crew of Light are indeed a squad of saintly liberators. This reading is tempting, but it resembles too much the violent and arrogant act of exorcism itself, which, committed to binary logic, presumes to liberate the pure 56 Downloaded By: [Smajic, Srdjan] At: 16:40 20 February 2009 Srdjan Smajić Dracula and duty soul trapped inside the Unclean body, charitably redeem the novel from its own moral failings and ideological blind spots, or approve of its selfsubverting impulses, its disapprobation of the vampire hunters’ violent means and morally suspect ends. Moreover, implicit in every critical intervention of this kind is the conviction that one can indeed tell ‘better’ from ‘worser’ parts: distinguish sanity from madness, Providence from propaganda, real and legitimate ‘duty to others’ from the illusion or willful manipulation of duty, and compartmentalize the text’s ethical currents accordingly. But this is precisely where Dracula poses an interpretive and ethical challenge, and why I am more interested in its critical-philosophical dimension than in how it resonates within its historical context. In the first place, the novel induces us to disclose the intellectual positions, ideological investments, and moral values that inform and direct, among other things, our investigation of the novel’s ideology, ethics, and psychology – our skepticism, say, about the objective existence of something like a duty drive, and our readiness to accept the reality of sexual and aggressive drives. Dracula reminds us that every interpretation (and not just of this text) that articulates or, more subtly, implies moral judgments must own up to, and if need be defend, the values that underwrite it – values that inform the critic’s understanding of social or divine justice, for instance, or intellectual, educational, and, ultimately, civic duty to the community of readers he or she is addressing. It is one thing to observe a fascist or racist strain in a literary text; it is quite another to endorse fascism or racism via a sympathetic or apologetic reading – the kind of reading that, when Stoker’s novel is concerned, might blithely accept staking and decapitation as perfectly legitimate means of liberation. It is one’s duty, one might say, to know better than to read naively and respond ignorantly; one ought to condemn, if only in passing, the ‘worser’ and commend the ‘better’ parts of the text, as well as the cultural values and ideological projects that inform these parts and are relayed through them. But Dracula challenges us ethically not just because it recalls us to our duty to be transparent about what we believe is right or wrong, both in this text and beyond it, but because it makes it difficult to separate with surgical precision the ‘worser’ from the ‘better’ parts, in the sense that it proposes that the two are identical: the same action can be unconditionally right and unconditionally wrong. Dracula’s ethics could be called scandalous and perverse because the novel rejects the exorcistic solution – the compartmentalization of its protagonists and the text itself into distinctly polarized ‘better’ and ‘worser’ camps and parts – and instead endorses not the comfortable option of moral relativism, where ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ are understood as situationally contingent categories, but a vexed, paradoxical moral dogmatism which embraces moral absolutes yet where we find the dutiful subject ‘forced by more than human considerations’ to act both 57 Downloaded By: [Smajic, Srdjan] At: 16:40 20 February 2009 Textual Practice for and against ‘the good of mankind, and the honour and glory of God’. Dracula is scandalous, then, because it demands of us to admit the possibility that it is sometimes imperative both to condemn and commend an action on the same moral grounds, and because the contradiction that structures this demand is impervious to rational resolution. It is easy to censure the violent cleansing of a supposedly polluted body or body politic as sadistic, opportunistic, arrogant. It is more challenging, and so perhaps all the more necessary, to imagine oneself in the position of Dracula’s duty-driven subjects, compelled to do what is at once right and wrong, and for whom pleasurable violence and self-sacrificing altruism are inextricably conjoined. The challenge is to approve and disapprove of the Crew’s actions, commend and condemn the text on the same gestures and claims, rather than segregate these into mutually oppositional camps. In other words, the problem is not how to extricate the novel’s endorsement of violence from its critique of violence, separate its arrogance from its humility, its vices from its virtues, but rather how not to force this separation in the first place and so avoid reading Dracula exorcistically, as a text polluted by moral failings and ideological impurities. ‘Dual life’ and double occupancy If Dracula is famously erotic and libidinal, as critics often point out, it is also notoriously incoherent, especially in regard to its logic of vampirism and exorcism. How, for example, does one make sense of Van Helsing’s theory (another ‘thesis’ of the credo quia absurdum variety) that the vampire hunters ‘have a duty’ to ‘sterilize’ the earth packed into Dracula’s coffins and ‘so sacred of holy memories’, in order to ‘make it more holy still’? (D, p. 260). Isn’t what Van Helsing has in mind not resanctification (for what would ‘more holy still’ mean?) but, perversely, de-sanctification? If so, how would one de-sanctify something with, of all things, a holy wafer, which is to say the body of Christ? And if communion wafers have the power to sterilize and cleanse, then why does the same procedure not only not work on Mina but result in fire-branding her with a ‘mark of shame’ from which she later may or may not be purged? Why does Van Helsing not foresee, since he knows so much about exorcistic matters, that results, as in the case of prescription drugs, may vary? If, as one suspects, the results are fundamentally unpredictable, then there is no fixed rule about planting wafers here and pressing them against foreheads there. Such sites of confusion, however, should not be regarded as inconsistencies that work against what would otherwise be a coherent theory of wafer application, exorcism, and vampirism in general, but are precisely 58 Downloaded By: [Smajic, Srdjan] At: 16:40 20 February 2009 Srdjan Smajić Dracula and duty the obverse: they are just what is most coherent and consistent in the text, though in a different sense from the one in which we usually use the terms. The mistake here is to yield to the temptation to imagine a corrective for Stoker’s novel and, prior to that, the need for a corrective, a cure for contradictions. Just as the ‘better’ and ‘worser’ parts of the text should not hastily be pitted against each other, since the novel proposes that the two are identical, so is there no more coherent and consistent Dracula to be constructed in critical discourse by ironing out the text’s inconsistencies, a discourse that would read the extant text as a sort of lesser, flawed version of itself. Rather, Stoker’s novel is coherently inconsistent, or consistently incoherent. In this sense it replicates the paradoxical condition of the subject who wakes up sane in an insane asylum to find, as Seward fears, that he or she indeed belongs in a strait-jacket – a subject whose sanity and insanity are impossible positions in so far as there is room in the lunatic cell (and the cell of the mind) only for one occupant: either the madman or the one mistaken for a madman, but not both at the same time, in the same place. What Van Helsing says of Lucy could be said of the contradictory logic of vampirism: ‘here is some dual life that is not as the common’ (D, p. 179).15 One facet, then, of Dracula’s uncommon ‘dual life’ is its construct of an impossible, sane-insane subject – the subject of what we might call a double occupancy, compelled to occupy the positions of right and wrong, driven to do what must and must not be done. If he or she is a double of the vampiric ‘dead Un-Dead’ subject (D, p. 184), the novel repeats this doubling in its consistently contradictory logic of vampire morality and the vampiric threat to Christian religion: the Count, it turns out, is Satan’s disciple and one of God’s dutiful subjects. I shall not bother to argue the first position, namely that the Count is devilish; the Crew of Light do an admirable job of demonizing him: ‘he is brute’, Van Helsing declares, ‘and more than brute; he is devil in callous, and the heart of him is not’ (D, p. 209). But Van Helsing is also ready to sing Dracula’s praises: ‘He must, indeed, have been that Voivode Dracula who won his name against the Turk, over the great river on the very frontier of Turkey-land. If it be so, then was he no common man; for in that time, and for centuries after, he was spoken of as the cleverest and the most cunning, as well as the bravest of the sons of the “land beyond the forest”’(D, p. 212). Lucy’s ‘dual life . . . is not as the common’ (D, p. 179) and the Count is similarly ‘no common man’ (D, p. 212). Van Helsing, who maligns Dracula more often than any other Crew member, is also his inspired, devoted biographer: the Count ‘was in life a most wonderful man. Soldier, statesman, and alchemist – which latter was the highest development of the science-knowledge in his time’ (D, p. 263). The story patched together from Van Helsing’s bio-notes on 59 Downloaded By: [Smajic, Srdjan] At: 16:40 20 February 2009 Textual Practice the Count is a backhanded eulogy, a conflicted lament for the ‘wonderful man’ Dracula was before he ‘had dealings with the Evil One’ (D, p. 212). Given the Count’s accomplishments in his former life, it is no wonder Van Helsing is tempted to imagine a kinder, gentler Dracula: ‘Oh! if such an one was to come from God, and not the Devil, what a force for good might he not be in this old world of ours’ (D, p. 279). Yet what if the Count is not on the other side of the Good-Evil divide but on both? What if the most inspiring, spiritually uplifting chapters in the biography of this ‘wonderful man’ are precisely those which most severely condemn him as the perpetrator of monstrous, unholy deeds? Dracula, we know, used to be a soldier of God, a valiant defender of the faith against Muslim infidels. The Crew of Light style themselves ‘ministers of God’s own wish’, modern-day reincarnations of the crusading ‘old knights of the Cross’, (D, p. 278), which is to say versions of the Count before he switched sides. But the Cross is not necessarily anathema to the Count. True, he cowers before it: ‘Further and further back he cowered’, Seward reports, ‘as we, lifting our crucifixes, advanced’ (D, p. 247). Earlier, Harker writes: ‘When the Count saw my face, his eyes blazed with a sort of demoniac fury, and he suddenly made a grab at my throat. I drew away, and his hand touched the string of beads which held the crucifix. It made an instant change in him, for the fury passed so quickly that I could hardly believe that it was ever there’ (D, p. 31). But what does this mean? Does the Count’s fury pass away so quickly because he is terrified of the crucifix (in which case one would expect him to show some sign of terror, which he does not) or because he is pacified, humbled, religiously interpellated by the Cross? If we accept this proposition, then Mina is both wrong and right to interpret the mist that announces Dracula’s arrival as a providential sign: ‘Was it indeed some . . . spiritual guidance that was coming to me in my sleep?’ (D, p. 227). Again, the mistake is to answer the question only in the affirmative or only in the negative. Torn between repulsion toward and admiration for the Count, Van Helsing is at pains to distinguish the morality of the hunters from the immorality of the hunted. While he wistfully speculates on the benefits of recruiting Dracula for God’s side, he insists that this is impossible: the Count is inveterate, irredeemable. And, unlike his pursuers, ‘he is not free’. Dracula ‘has the strength of many in his hand’; he can ‘transform himself to wolf’ and ‘be as bat’; he ‘can come in mist which he create’ and ‘come on moonlight rays as elemental dust’; in fact, he can ‘come out from anything or into anything, no matter how close it be bound or even fused up with fire’ (D, p. 211). But, Van Helsing claims, these extreme liberties pale in comparison to the vampire’s numerous natural limitations: 60 Srdjan Smajić Dracula and duty Downloaded By: [Smajic, Srdjan] At: 16:40 20 February 2009 He can do all these things, yet he is not free. Nay; he is even more prisoner than the slave of the galley, than the madman in his cell. He cannot go where he lists; he who is not of nature has yet to obey some of nature’s laws – why we know not. He may not enter anywhere at the first, unless there be some one of the household who bid him to come; though afterwards he can come as he please. His power ceases, as does that of all evil things, at the coming of the day. Only at certain times can he have limited freedom. If he be not at the place whither he is bound, he can only change himself at noon or at exact sunrise or sunset. (D, p. 211). Contrasting themselves to this super-limited subject, a subject defined by what he dare not and cannot, must not and ought not do, the Crew imagine themselves ‘free to act and think’ (D, p. 210). But in so far as their individual and collective identities are defined by ‘high duty’, in so far as they are all passionately and violently duty-driven subjects, they are precisely not ‘free to act and think’ as they please. Much like the Count, the Crew are ‘more prisoner than the slave of the galley, than the madman in his cell’ (D, p. 211). They are all ‘God’s madmen’ (D, p. 111). But Dracula encourages us to take this logic even further and risk a more scandalous proposition. Having successfully fought off the Turkish infidels, the Count has surely done more ‘for the honour and glory of God’ than all the vampire hunters together. He has also, however, ‘had dealings with the Evil One’. What else is vampirism, then, but both his reward and his punishment? Instead of being dispatched either to hell or heaven, Dracula enjoys and suffers the painful pleasures of the ‘dead Un-Dead’: everlasting life-death. He is subject to a Lord and Master who loves and hates him with equal passion. The feeling, I would suggest, is mutual. Dracula loves and hates God because he is at once God’s favorite and an outcast from God, punished and rewarded with eternal vampiric non-life – an impossible version of Satan, whom God rewards and punishes with the same gesture.16 If one must, then, yield to the temptation to diagnose Dracula, the diagnosis must shape itself along the contours of his constitutive duality, his double occupancy. Again Stoker’s novel poses an interpretive, epistemological challenge that doubles as a moral test. The diagnostician (and reader) must discover a way to classify and treat the Count as a heretic, a demon, an enemy of God – and God’s dutiful subject. Under such a diagnosis the Count would not be suffering from a split or multiple personality disorder, whose cure would be the recovery of some unitary, coherent and consistent self. Rather, he would need to be interpreted and treated – psychoanalytically, theologically, critically – as both having and not having a disorder, patient and non-patient, unholy and holy, cursed and blessed. It is only if 61 Downloaded By: [Smajic, Srdjan] At: 16:40 20 February 2009 Textual Practice he is radically and consistently both that one can make sense of the re-sanctifying of his sacred earth, his dread and adoration of the crucifix, and his otherwise puzzling decision to store his imported coffins in a chapel, in the direct presence of God. After Dracula’s final metamorphosis, when his ‘whole body crumble[s] into dust’ and his soul ascends to heaven – ‘I shall be glad’, Mina writes, ‘as long as I live that even in that moment of final dissolution, there was in the face a look of peace, such as I never could have imagined might have rested there’ (D, p. 325) – it is difficult to resist imagining the Count, Lucy, and Mina reunited in heaven in a sacred ménage a trois. ‘Your girls that you all love’, he earlier gloats to the Crew’s men, ‘are mine already’ (D, p. 267). A similar double position is occupied by all members of the Crew, who must do what they know is at once right and wrong, pious and impious, but Mina is most acutely aware of its maddening contradictions: ‘Everything that one does seems, no matter how right it may be, to bring on the very thing which is most to be deplored’ (D, p. 226, my italics). Because she knows she has been more instrumental than the other Crew members in tracking down the Count and securing his destruction (her organizational skills and motivational influence are recognized by the men as invaluable), Mina’s condition is such that it requires us to diagnose her, like Dracula, with two irreconcilable interpretations, both of which are in fact articulated by the Crew, albeit never in immediate conjunction. ‘She is’, in Van Helsing’s view, ‘one of God’s women, fashioned by His own hand to show us men and other women that there is a heaven where we can enter, and that its light can be here on earth. So true, so sweet, so noble, so little an egoist – and that, let me tell you, is much in this age, so sceptical and selfish’ (D, pp. 168–69). A miracle of selflessness in an egotistic age, Mina is a guiding beacon illuminating the certainty, should one ever doubt it, that there is a heaven and that the righteous will be rewarded with eternal residence in it. But she is also correctly diagnosed as Unclean and branded with a ‘mark of shame’, not because she has imbibed vampiric blood but because she has committed herself to shedding it – as she should and should not. To modify Van Helsing’s aptly pardoxical ‘dead Un-Dead’ construct, Mina is clean Un-Clean. Seward, for one, has no doubt that ‘she with all her goodness and purity and faith, was outcast from God’ (D, p. 268). That the Count’s face should soften into beatific, saintly features as Mina’s shameful scar vanishes and she is restored to spiritual purity is not so much ironic as it is consistent with the parallel positions of the Crew and the Count. In the end, these doublings reflect on the morality of Dracula itself, which makes the demand – as much as a text can make a demand on a reader – that we judge it twice, doubly and dually, to commend and condemn its symbiotic conjoining of violence and pity, arrogance and self-sacrifice, and to do so absolutely, irreconcilably, without rationalizing the text into ‘worser’ and ‘better’ parts. 62 Srdjan Smajić Dracula and duty Downloaded By: [Smajic, Srdjan] At: 16:40 20 February 2009 The case of Renfield It is only now that we can appreciate the significance of Renfield, that apparently marginal yet, it turns out, central character in the novel, in whom ‘duty’ and ‘insanity’ become fully synonymous. Like the pious Crew of Light, Renfield powerfully feels the presence of a Lord and Master, in his case Dracula, whose commands must be followed unconditionally. Stuck in Seward’s asylum (curiously, we are never told what landed him there), Renfield’s moral tragedy is ostensibly that he can hear at all hours of night and day his Master’s voice but is helpless to execute his commands. Seward reports Renfield raving: ‘I am here to do Your bidding, Master. I am Your slave, and You will reward me, for I shall be faithful. I have worshipped You long and afar off. Now that You are near, I await Your commands, and You will not pass me by, will You, dear Master, in Your distribution of good things?’ Seward’s snide remark that Renfield ‘thinks of the loaves and fishes even when he believes he is in a Real Presence’ (D, p. 98) is meant to tell us two things: Renfield worships a false God (a conspicuous violation the First Commandment), and is disrespectful even of this false God, as he can only think of how he will be rewarded for doing his duty. Yet what Seward takes to be a tell-tale symptom of insanity, namely Renfield’s conviction that consuming live creatures (flies, spiders, birds, kittens) prolongs life, proves to be true: vampires feed on the living and this diet is particularly conducive to longevity. The false God has something to offer after all. Moreover, the demand that one choose the true over the false deity, like the impulse to sever ‘worser’ from ‘better’ parts in texts or persons, is premised on the kind of binary thinking that Dracula is driven to disassemble. The Count’s promise to his devoted subjects that they will be rewarded with eternal life-death (a promise fulfilled whenever he vamps someone in the novel) suggests that Dracula, while perhaps not a god, is certainly ‘the father and furtherer of a new order of beings’ (D, p. 263), a prophet or messiah whose gospel, written in blood, is repeatedly corroborated by empirical evidence. How, in other words, is one not to follow Dracula? ‘The blood is the life! the blood is the life!’ (D, p. 130) Renfield ecstatically raves, echoing Christ’s words to his disciples. And he is right to do so; the blood is the life.17 When he vows to ‘fight for [his] Lord and Master’ (D, p. 142), Renfield enlists himself in the service of one who has made good on his promises to his dutiful subjects – a Lord and Master who proves true to his word. Given the modus operandi of the duty drive, this enlistment is involuntary; the dutiful subject cannot choose but to submit, reward or no reward. But this is not the real scandal of Renfield’s position; that his incarceration should prevent him from doing what his Master demands of 63 Downloaded By: [Smajic, Srdjan] At: 16:40 20 February 2009 Textual Practice him is not what makes his condition ‘impossible’ in the sense in which I’ve used this word. Of the three diagnoses Seward pronounces for his favorite patient – ‘undeveloped homicidal maniac’ (D, p. 70), ‘zoophagous (lifeeating) maniac’ (D, p. 71), and ‘religious mania[c]’ – the third is furthest from what we come to see is the truth of Renfield’s condition. It is not that Renfield believes, as a religious maniac might, ‘that he himself is God’ (D, p. 96) and thus his own Master. Rather, he believes – and believes with equal fervor and conviction – that he must serve two Masters, Dracula and God. It is not clear, and perhaps not clear to Renfield either, which of the two he supplicates and vows faithfully to serve when he cries: ‘I am here to do Your bidding, Master. I am Your slave, and You will reward me, for I shall be faithful’ (D, p. 98). Faithful to whom? Dracula is the obvious choice. But we know that Renfield also prays to God, and most passionately when he engages the Count in physical struggle. Harker reports: ‘Dr Seward asked the attendant who was on duty in the passage if he had heard anything. He said that he had been sitting down – he confessed to half dozing – when he heard loud voices in the room, and then Renfield had called out loudly several times, “God! God! God!”. . . . He could swear to it, if required, that the word “God” was spoken by the patient’ (D, p. 253). Can one be faithful to two jealous Masters who are antagonistic to each other and will each severely punish the subject whose devotion is divided between them, incomplete on either side?18 If the duty drive is maddening, and if the dutiful subject is the doppelgänger of the one who wakes up sane in an insane asylum, sane and yet rightly locked up, then Renfield’s position as the star carceral subject of Seward’s institution not only literalizes the figurative comparison between a duty-driven and a strait-jacketed subject, it also serves to put the Crew of Light precisely where they belong: in a room with padded walls. Suspecting that Renfield may be of use to them in their pursuit of Dracula, the Crew gather in his cell to question him. But it is they who are interrogated and put to the test: their sanity, their moral conscience, their sense of duty are challenged by a madman who, as Van Helsing afterwards suspects, may have a better grasp of reality than they do and can offer ‘more knowledge’ than ‘the teaching of the most wise’ (D, p. 225). Renfield’s request to his doctor-jailor Seward, which he extends to the rest of the Crew, is this: he wishes to be released from the asylum, not just because he has been falsely diagnosed as insane and wrongfully incarcerated, but because the misdiagnosis is keeping him from doing his duty – a rationale he rightly guesses will strike a sympathetic cord in his audience. He flatters their talents and professional accomplishments, then turns to Seward and directly appeals to his ‘moral duty’ to consider the peculiarity of his position: ‘You, gentlemen, who by nationality, by 64 Srdjan Smajić Dracula and duty Downloaded By: [Smajic, Srdjan] At: 16:40 20 February 2009 heredity, or by the possession of natural gifts, are fitted to hold your respective places in the moving world, I take to witness that I am as sane as at least the majority of men who are in full possession of their liberties. And I am sure that you, Dr Seward, humanitarian and medico-jurist as well as scientist, will deem it a moral duty to deal with me as one to be considered as under exceptional circumstances’ (D, pp. 215–16). Seward is tempted to comply: ‘For my own part, I was under the conviction, despite my knowledge of the man’s character and history, that his reason had been restored; and I felt under a strong impulse to tell him that I was satisfied as to his sanity, and would see about the necessary formalities for his release in the morning’ (D, p. 216). The temptation passes, though, and Renfield must now try a different strategy. The moral ace up his straitjacket’s sleeve is an appeal whose persuasive force the Crew cannot easily disregard: Then I suppose I must only shift my ground of request. Let me ask for this concession – boon, privilege, what you will. I am content to implore in such a case, not on personal grounds, but for the sake of others. I am not at liberty to give you the whole of my reasons; but you may, I assure you, take it from me that they are good ones, sound and unselfish, and springing from the highest sense of duty. Could you look, sir, into my heart, you would approve to the full the sentiments which animate me. Nay, more, you would count me amongst the best and truest of your friends. (D, p. 216, my italics). To wish to do something ‘for the sake of others’, to be urged to action by an ‘unselfish’ instinct or drive that ‘spring[s] from the highest sense of duty’ is – to be utterly insane. Not, that is, because Seward suspects that, ‘like all lunatics’, this one too will ‘give himself away in the end’ (D, p. 216), but precisely because he is to be believed when he says he is acting ‘from the highest sense of duty’. As Seward knows, the sense of duty is the most maddening of all urges. The first mention of Renfield in Seward’s journal transitions from a diagnosis of the patient to a brief speculation on the deleterious effects of an inordinately developed duty drive: R. M. Renfield, ætat 59. – Sanguine temperament; great physical strength; morbidly excitable; periods of gloom ending in some fixed idea which I cannot make out. I presume that the sanguine temperament itself and the disturbing influence end in a mentallyaccomplished finish; a possibly dangerous man, probably dangerous if unselfish. In selfish men caution is as secure an armour for their 65 Textual Practice Downloaded By: [Smajic, Srdjan] At: 16:40 20 February 2009 foes as for themselves. What I think of on this point is, when self is the fixed point the centripetal force is balanced with the centrifugal; when duty, a cause, etc., is the fixed point, the latter force is paramount, and only accident or a series of accidents can balance it. (D, p. 62, my italics). The duty-driven subject spins out of control. Renfield is too dutiful, too unselfish, too committed to others to be called sane. We now understand why the Crew are at times eager to embrace egotism: it is the centripetal cure to the centrifugal duty drive. Dracula, they believe, is egotism incarnate. He has a ‘child-brain’, according to Van Helsing, that makes him ‘predestine to crime’ (D, p. 296) and incapable of conceiving a single altruistic thought. As Mina diagnostically explains, ‘as he is criminal he is selfish; and as his intellect is small and his action is based on selfishness, he confines himself to one purpose’ (D, p. 297). Mina fears she too is selfish at times, but Van Helsing assures her that her selfishness is for the greater good: ‘Nay! fear not, you must be egotist, for it is of you that we think’. A little egotism, if it is of the right kind, goes a long way to stabilize the course of duty; if Mina were to be so unselfish as to neglect her own safety and well-being, the rest of the Crew could not do their duty and protect her. ‘[Y]our safety is our solemnest duty’ (D, p. 284), Van Helsing tells her. The right mixture of selflessness and selfishness is the key to moral success, but the exact ratio of ingredients is a secret hidden from everyone in Dracula. Van Helsing believes that ‘the very thing that the evil doer most reckoned on for his selfish good, turns out to be his chiefest harm’. The Count will implode, Van Helsing suggests, as there is no centrifugal counterforce to his centripetal, self-destructive egotism.19 ‘We, however’, he insists, ‘are not all selfish, and we believe that God is with us through all this blackness, and these many dark hours’ (D, p. 297, my italics). Because Renfield’s duty inconveniently prevents him from being more specific about what this duty compels him to do, Van Helsing complains that this proviso of silence, though it may in fact be morally justifiable, nonetheless makes it impossible for the Crew to perform their duty to him, namely decide whether or not to release him: ‘If you will not help us in our effort to choose the wisest course, how can we perform the duty which you yourself put upon us?’ (D, p. 217). The dramatic finale to the episode in Renfield’s cell – he abandons reason and hysterically screams and begs to be released ‘for the sake of the Almighty’ (D, p. 218) – has a predictable follow-up: the cell door stays shut. Not, though, because Renfield has at last revealed the incurable madness lurking behind the mask of reason and sanity, but because there is nothing he can say at this point that would enable the Crew to make a 66 Downloaded By: [Smajic, Srdjan] At: 16:40 20 February 2009 Srdjan Smajić Dracula and duty more favorable diagnosis of his condition. When Renfield cries: ‘Don’t you know that I am sane and earnest now; that I am no lunatic in a mad fit, but a sane man fighting for his soul? Oh, hear me! hear me! Let me go! let me go! let me go!’ (D, p. 218), it is either the madly dutiful (hence insane) or madly deluded (hence, again, insane) Renfield speaking. Have the Crew done the right thing? Seward has his doubts, but Van Helsing reassures him: ‘Friend John, have no fear. We are trying to do our duty in a very sad and terrible case; we can only do as we deem best. What else have we to hope for, except the pity of the good God?’ (D, p. 219). Renfield’s double occupancy, his irreconcilable dual allegiance to God and Dracula, is such that there is simply no way to do only the right thing for him, just as he cannot do only the right thing for himself, his Master(s), or those others of whom he never ceases to think: the same ‘teeming millions’ for whose physical safety and spiritual well-being the Crew are crusading. His case is not exceptional after all, but symptomatic of the condition suffered both by the Crew and the novel itself, a text in which certain psychological, ethical, and religious antitheses – sane/insane, right/wrong, holy/unholy, blessed/cursed – maintain their absolute distance from each other while, paradoxically, revealing their identical natures. By keeping Renfield locked up, the Crew are both doing and failing to do their duty to him. Because he is in the impossible position of one who is saneinsane – just as Mina and the rest of the Crew are ‘God’s madmen’, insane ministers of God’s own wish’ – releasing him would carry the same moral weight as keeping him locked up. Similarly, it finally does not matter, morally speaking, whether ‘the mercy-bearing stake’ is forced into the vampiric body or if the duty drive stays the executioner-exorcist’s hand; the Crew would in either case be doing what must and must not be done, what God demands and forbids them to do. The duty drive is maddening not just because it incapacitates rational decision making but also because it drives one away from duty. The cure for duty From the cynic’s standpoint, duty is a convenient excuse to do as one likes: it ‘sternly impels us in the direction of profit, along the line of desire’. From the madman’s perspective, duty is at once irresistible and impossible. It is this unbearable, maddening pressure to do what is absolutely right-wrong that Van Helsing cures in Renfield the only way Dracula suggests is possible: surgically, invasively, violently. After the jealous and possessive Count crushes Renfield’s skull and breaks his spine as punishment for resisting him, Van Helsing performs a triage procedure on Renfield that will ‘reduce the pressure’ in his cranium ‘and get back to normal conditions, 67 Downloaded By: [Smajic, Srdjan] At: 16:40 20 February 2009 Textual Practice as far as can be’ (D, p. 242). The operation is reminiscent of a lobotomy, from which Renfield awakes not to sanity but freedom of speech – which is here to say, speech that, for once, does not contradict itself and make impossible demands on the Crew. ‘I couldn’t speak then’, he tells Van Helsing, referring to his enslavement to his Master’s will (or the will of his two Masters), ‘for I felt my tongue was tied; but I was as sane then, except in that way, as I am now’. The surgery is a success, in a manner of speaking. Renfield, the conflicted, tongue-tied epitome of the dutiful subject – compelled to do what is and is not the right thing, servant to two Masters who have equal claim upon him and whom he loves with equal passion – is at last cured of his double occupancy. What is unclear, however, is whether it is Dracula’s rage that kills him or Van Helsing’s impromptu intervention. The latter is the more tempting reading, as it allows us to make one final comparison. Like sexual and aggressive urges, the duty drive is vampiric. Just as the charitable exorcism of polluted vampiric flesh demands an execution, the duty drive can be expelled only with the death of the sufferer. With what kind of afterlife (if any) the dutiful subject is rewarded or punished is anybody’s guess. ‘I am dying!’, the briefly resuscitated Renfield tells Van Helsing; ‘I have but a few minutes; and then I must go back to death – or worse!’ (D, p. 244). Furman University Notes 1 I follow Christopher Craft [‘“Kiss Me with Those Red Lips”: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula’, Representations, 8 (1984), pp. 107– 133] in referring to the vampire hunters as the Crew of Light. The team name, now commonly used in Dracula criticism, is derived from an etymological extraction of light from Lucy Westenra’s first name. Whereas most scholars reserve Crew membership to Dracula’s male vampire hunters (Abraham Van Helsing, John Seward, Jonathan Harker, Arthur Holmwood, and Quincey Morris), I include Mina Murray in the group as well for reasons that will become clear. 2 Bram Stoker, Dracula (hereafter D) (New York and London: Norton, 1997), pp. 157, 158. Here and elsewhere I preserve Van Helsing’s speech idiosyncrasies. 3 Scholarship dealing with Dracula’s heterosexuality, homosexuality, and bisexuality is extensive. Beside Craft, see C. F. Bentley, ‘The Monster in the Bedroom: Sexual Symbolism in Bram Stoker’s Dracula’, Literature and Psychology, 22 (1972), pp. 27 –34; Stephanie Demetrakopoulos, ‘Feminism, Sex Role Exchanges, and Other Subliminal Fantasies in Bram Stoker’s Dracula’, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 2.3 (1977), pp. 104– 113; 68 Srdjan Smajić Dracula and duty Downloaded By: [Smajic, Srdjan] At: 16:40 20 February 2009 4 5 6 7 8 Phyllis A. Roth, ‘Suddenly Sexual Women in Bram Stoker’s Dracula’, Literature and Psychology, 27 (1977), pp. 113 – 21; Marjorie Howes, ‘The Mediation of the Feminine: Bisexuality, Homoerotic Desire, and Self-Expression in Bram Stoker’s Dracula’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 30.1 (1988), pp. 104 –19; John Allen Stevenson, ‘A Vampire in the Mirror: The Sexuality of Dracula’, PMLA, 103.2 (1988), pp. 139 –49; Talia Schaffer, ‘“A Wilde Desire Took Me”: The Homoerotic History of Dracula’, ELH, 61.2 (1994), pp. 381 –425. The loss of individualism and autonomy can be read differently: a necessity which the Crew of Light strategically embrace to ensure the survival of their species. In How Novels Think: The Limits of British Individualism from 1719 – 1900 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), Nancy Armstrong picks Dracula as representative of the late-Victorian literary trend to endorse what she calls polygenetic thinking. ‘Dracula has the edge on his European antagonists because his thinking is not his own but a fundamentally synthetic process. Having transcended the limits of individual embodiment [vampires are less individuals than members of a collective vampiric body], the vampire’s mind can travel across categories of gender, class, nation, and species . . . . To conquer the vampire, the vampire hunters have to think like their prey. Each has to shed his autonomy, for individualism only hampers a campaign where each exists only to defeat a common foe. Forget privacy, reason, and morality of the conventional kind . . . . What matters is the survival of human reproduction’ (p. 130). Holmwood inherits the title Lord Godalming after his father’s death. The automatic response to the call of duty, and the pathologizing of the dutydriven subject, is a recurrent trope in the novel. On their wedding day, Mina and Harker make a pact not to read his journal, ‘unless, indeed’, she reports him saying, ‘some solemn duty should come upon me to go back to the bitter hours, asleep or awake, sane or mad, recorded here’ (D, p. 100, my italics). Mina later slightly, but significantly, misquotes Harker’s words: ‘I remember how on our wedding-day he said: “Unless some solemn duty come upon me to go back to the bitter hours, asleep or awake, mad or sane”’(D, p. 161). ‘[S]ane or mad’ becomes ‘mad or sane’, suggesting that madness rather than sanity is the first and correct diagnosis for a dutiful subject. In ‘Dracula: The Unseen Face in the Mirror’ [The Journal of Narrative Technique, 9 (1979), pp. 160 –70], Carol A. Senf argues that Stoker’s novel, by foregrounding the unreliability of its multiple narrators, encourages us to see through their efforts to mask ‘their lust for power under the rubric of religion, their love of violence under the names of imperialism and progress, their sexual desires within an elaborate courtship ritual’ (p. 166). ‘In fact, Stoker implies that the only difference between Dracula and his opponents is the narrators’ ability to state individual desire in terms of what they believe is a common good’ (p. 165). Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary (New York: Dover, 1993), p. 27. When it first appeared in 1906, its title was The Cynic’s Word Book. 69 Downloaded By: [Smajic, Srdjan] At: 16:40 20 February 2009 Textual Practice 9 Previously, Mina is able to talk herself out of feeling pity for Dracula because, she reasons, he is not human: ‘I suppose one ought to pity any thing so hunted as is the Count. That is just it: this Thing is not human – not even beast. To read Dr Seward’s account of poor Lucy’s death, and what followed, is enough to dry up the springs of pity in one’s heart’ (D, p. 202). Dracula’s essential humanity, however, soon resurfaces as indispensable to the Crew’s pityingly imagining him as someone who must be destroyed in order to be saved: such salvation, it seems, can be bestowed only upon an equal. 10 The secret of Dracula’s seductive hold over readers and critics lies in the metaphoric malleability of the figure of the vampire. If, as Ken Gelder observes, ‘this is a novel which seems (these days, especially) to generate readings, rather than close them down’ [Reading the Vampire (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 65], the reason has predominantly to do with Dracula’s function as a sort of vacant signifier. The Count ‘is so suggestively amorphous in Stoker’s novel’, remarks Nina Auerbach, ‘that he is free to shift his shape with each new twentieth-century trend’ [Our Vampires, Ourselves (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 83]. Franco Moretti, for instance, argues (somewhat incongruously) that ‘the vampire is a metaphor for [monopoly] capital’ as well as the return of the repressed: ‘the monster metaphor, the vampire metaphor . . . . “filters”, makes bearable to the conscious mind those desires and fears which the latter has judged to be unacceptable and has thus been forced to repress, and whose existence it consequently cannot recognize’. Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders: On the Sociology of Literary Forms (1983; London and New York: Verso, 2005), pp. 92, 103. 11 In order to ‘mak[e] [him]self master of the facts’ of Renfield’s madness, Seward resorts to what he knows is ethically borderline medical practice: exacerbating the patient’s insanity to develop its full potential. ‘In my manner of doing it there was, I now see, something of cruelty. I seemed to wish to keep him to the point of his madness – a thing which I avoid with the patients as I would the mouth of hell’ (D, p. 61). But as Michel Foucault has shown, this was standard practice in the nineteenth-century asylum, which operated as a controlled site where mental illness was not just diagnosed and treated but also produced in its pure form. ‘The great asylum physician . . . is both the one who can tell the truth of the disease through the knowledge [savoir] he has of it and the one who can produce the disease in its truth and subdue it in its reality, through the power that his will exerts on the patient himself’. Foucault, ‘Psychiatric Power’, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, trans. Robert Hurley et al., ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1997), p. 43. 12 On Dracula and degeneration, see Ernest Fontana, ‘Lombroso’s Criminal Man and Stoker’s Dracula’, Victorian Newsletter, 66 (1984), pp. 25– 27; Daniel Pick, ‘“Terrors of the Night”: Dracula and “Degeneration” in the Late Nineteenth Century’, Critical Quarterly, 30.4 (1988), pp. 71 –87; Kathleen L. Spencer, ‘Purity and Danger: Dracula, the Urban Gothic, and the Late Victorian Degeneracy Crisis’, ELH, 59.1 (1992), pp. 197– 225. 70 Downloaded By: [Smajic, Srdjan] At: 16:40 20 February 2009 Srdjan Smajić Dracula and duty 13 Shoshana Felman, ‘Turning the Screw of Interpretation’, Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise, ed. Shoshana Felman (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), p. 195. 14 On ‘stigmata’ in nineteenth-century degeneration theory, see Stephen Arata, Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle: Identity and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), particularly Chapter One, ‘Strange cases, common fates: degeneration and fiction in the Victorian fin de siècle’. 15 Lucy is unique, Van Helsing explains, because ‘bitten by the vampire when she was in a trance, sleep-walking . . . . In trance she died, and in trance she is Un-Dead, too. So it is that she differ from all other’ vampires, namely when she is not awake, ‘she go back to the nothings of the common dead’ (D, p. 179). 16 Harker’s journey through the Carpathians takes him past a mountain peak called ‘God’s seat’ (D, p. 15) and into a ‘cursed land, where the devil and his children still walk with earthly feet!’ (D, p. 55). Overtly symbolic, the journey is a hybrid of Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress and Dante’s Inferno. 17 To survive, Lucy must receive numerous transfusions. ‘She wants blood’, Van Helsing bluntly puts it, ‘and blood she must have or die’ (D, p. 113). On Dracula’s obsession with blood, one of several motifs that confound the novel’s efforts to distinguish between superstition and religion, see Christopher Herbert, ‘Vampire Religion’, Representations, 79 (2002), pp. 100– 121. Herbert persuasively argues that ‘the image of the vampire is not that of the depraved or primitive other of religion after all, but of religion itself, and that all the organized labor of eradication dramatized in Dracula may best be construed as an effort to mystify the essential bond between vampirism and Christian faith’ (p. 111). 18 That the guard ‘on duty’ should confess to having dozed off, arguably undermines the veracity of his testimony. Interestingly, the Crew do not doubt his sincerity, perhaps because they know that the cry ‘God! God! God!’ is precisely what one might expect to hear from a madman. 19 ‘I suppose’, Lucy ruminates in a late metastasis of vampirism, ‘it is that sickness and weakness are selfish things and turn our inner eyes and sympathy on ourselves, whilst health and strength give Love rein’ (D, pp. 117 – 18). Likewise, her mother’s terminal illness transforms her into an exemplary egotist. But, Seward explains, this is really in everyone’s best interest: ‘It is something like the way Dame Nature gathers round a foreign body an envelope of some insensitive tissue which can protect from evil that which it would otherwise harm by contact. If this be an ordered selfishness, then we should pause before we condemn any one for the vice of egoism, for there may be deeper roots for its causes than we have knowledge of’ (D, p. 112). Seward’s theory of ‘an envelope of some insensitive tissue’ anticipates Sigmund Freud’s speculations in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) on ‘a special envelope or membrane resistant to stimuli’, a ‘protective shield’ guarding the psyche from excessive and harmful external stimuli. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York and London: Norton, 1989), p. 30. 71