CHAPTER V
Dr. Seward’s Diary.
(Kept in phonograph)
25 May.—Ebb tide in appetite to-day. Cannot eat, cannot rest, so diary instead. Since my rebuff of yesterday I have a sort of empty feeling; nothing in the world seems of sufficient importance to be worth the doing… As I knew that the only cure for this sort of thing was work, I went down amongst the patients. I picked out one who has afforded me a study of much interest. He is so quaint that I am determined to understand him as well as I can. To-day I seemed to get nearer than ever before to the heart of his mystery.
I questioned him more fully than I had ever done, with a view to making myself master of the facts of his hallucination. 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.
(Mem., under what circumstances would I not avoid the pit of hell?) Omnia Romæ venalia sunt. Hell has its price! verb. sap. If there be anything behind this instinct it will be valuable to trace it afterwards accurately, so I had better commence to do so, therefore—
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 mentally-accomplished finish; a possibly dangerous man, probably dangerous if unselfish. In selfish men caution is as secure an armour for their 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.
Letter, Quincey P. Morris to Hon. Arthur Holmwood.
"25 May.
"My dear Art,—
"We’ve told yarns by the camp-fire in the prairies; and dressed one another’s wounds after trying a landing at the Marquesas; and drunk healths on the shore of Titicaca. There are more yarns to be told, and other wounds to be healed, and another health to be drunk. Won’t you let this be at my camp-fire to-morrow night? I have no hesitation in asking you, as I know a certain lady is engaged to a certain dinner-party, and that you are free. There will only be one other, our old pal at the Korea, Jack Seward. He’s coming, too, and we both want to mingle our weeps over the wine-cup, and to drink a health with all our hearts to the happiest man in all the wide world, who has won the noblest heart that God has made and the best worth winning. We promise you a hearty welcome, and a loving greeting, and a health as true as your own right hand. We shall both swear to leave you at home if you drink too deep to a certain pair of eyes. Come!
"Yours, as ever and always,
“Quincey P. Morris.”
La mort de l’auteur. Whether Stoker consciously intended it or not is irrelevant, so long as it’s in the text.
But if you really do want to work out if he may have intended it, I wouldn’t count him out just because his most famous work is regarded as pulpy genre writing. He certainly didn’t rush it out in the way usually associated with pulp. It was at least 7 years from conception to completion, and in that time he did a copious amount of research into many of the aspects of his story, from Wallachian culture & history to trans-European train timetables. He also had worked in and around the theatre for 2 decades, so he clearly knew his literary history.
Oh wow yeah that brings back memories… I took an intro to literary criticism class back in the 90s and every week prof’d go through another movement (Romanticism, New Criticism, Formalism, Structuralism, then the various types of Post-Structuralism… there were a couple others…) I remember Jacques Lacan had some pretty cool ideas tho I don’t remember much about them… Dunno wtf the kids are being taught these days tho… Wait, I think I took a couple more critical theory classes too but it was a while back…
If I were an undergrad and wanted to do an old-school literary interpretation of Dracula, based on what we’d read so far I’d be thinking about:
Anyway, I realize there’s more than authorial intent, but my point is if you read the later James Joyce (for example) every single word in the text is placed there for a reason and is maybe intentionally building symbolism or making allusions or playing a word-game and there can be value in trying to reproduce that reasoning, but I don’t think Stoker’s going that far even tho he’s taking his writing duties seriously.
The colonial interpretation is also quite a popular one with Dracula. I hadn’t heard of a Marxist interpretation of Dracula specifically before, but class-based interpretations of vampires more generally are very, very common, and I’m not surprised that doing a search just now turns up quite a lot of Marxist results.