The theology of Dracula: reading the book of Stoker as sacred text PDF
Preview The theology of Dracula: reading the book of Stoker as sacred text
The Theology of Dracula This page intentionally left blank The Theology of Dracula Reading the Book of Stoker as Sacred Text NOËL MONTAGUE-ÉTIENNE RARIGNAC McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Jefferson, North Carolina, and London LIBRARYOFCONGRESSCATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATIONDATA Rarignac, Noël Montague-Étienne. The theology of Dracula : reading the book of Stoker as sacred text / Noël Montague-Étienne Rarignac. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7864-6499-9 softcover : acid free paper 1. Stoker, Bram, 1847–1912. Dracula. 2. Christianity in literature. 3. Horror tales, English—History and criticism. 4. Dracula, Count (Fictitious character) 5. Vampires in literature. I. Title. PR6037.T617D7864 2012 823'.8—dc23 2011051316 BRITISHLIBRARYCATALOGUINGDATAAREAVAILABLE © 2012 Noël Montague-Étienne Rarignac.All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, i ncluding photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without p ermission in writing from the publisher. Front cover design by David K. Landis (Shake It Loose Graphics) Manufactured in the United States of America McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Box 611, Je›erson, North Carolina 28640 www.mcfarlandpub.com Table of Contents Acknowledgments vi Preface 1 The Sealed Receptacle 7 Genesis 17 Revelation 55 Revolution 91 Syzygy 101 The Children of Night 124 Kingdom Come 150 The Overturned Lamp 181 Coniunctio Oppositorium 196 Bibliography 224 Index 229 v Acknowledgments This is to recognize the generous contribution made to this project by Professor Mark M. Hennelly, Jr., who took time to read and comment on four or five first draft chapters of someone he has never met. Having come across his essay “Dracula: The Gnostic Quest and Victorian Wasteland,” I sought Mark out as the only critic to have approached Stoker’s text in ways that were familiar to me. Certain paragraphs of the book were written in direct answer to his probing questions (“What do you mean by sacred?”) regarding my own conclusions. Thanks is also due to Dr. Massimo Introvigne of the Centre for the Study of New Religions (CENSUR) in Turin for his willingness to read and comment on sections of a book being written by an absolute stranger. The generosity of these scholars deserves acknowledgment and this expression of my gratitude. I am also grateful for the assistance of many dedicated librarians, par- ticularly the staff of the Bibliothèque Gaston Baty, Paris, the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Paris; the Bibliothèque de Chalons-sur-Marne, Chalons-sur-Marne, and the special collections department of the John Rylands Library, Man- chester, England. I would like to thank my old friend Jacques Aumont for his belief in what analysis can accomplish and his embrace of the descriptive act; M. le Comte d’Haussonville and Esther Duran, administrative director of the Château de Coppet; the Frères et Soeurs de Jerusalem au Mont-Saint- Michel; Isabelle Grasswill and the staff of the Monuments nationaux de France; and Lizzie Calligas and her band of friends at the Cyceon in Elefsina who were so kind and helpful to me as I walked the Sacred Way. vi Preface Largely drafted during the late spring and early summer of 2010, the chapters of this book quickly followed each other into existence. While some sustained hard thinking went into the effort, an unstanchable flow sourced in Stoker’s novel carried the project forward, new chapters appearing every second or third week. An informed belief that Draculamight be a sacred text, derived from a study of earlier iterations of the Vampire Tale, provided irresistible impe- tus; the ways in which the novel is a spiritual meditation carried the project forward to completion, leaving its author awed by the depth of the work Stoker bequeathed to posterity and by its cleverness and conceptual beauty. While medical researchers doggedly pursue the study of deadly patholo- gies without ever being suspected of being enthusiasts of disease, within the domains of letters, arts, and humanities there is an assumption that some kind of pre-existing passion for a subject must be present to drive the researcher, that scholars pursue only those subjects for which they feel a particular affinity, that somehow the researcher’s leisure interests and professional activities align. This is not necessarily true, since it is not the case here. No inexplicable attraction to the sanguine, no predilection for superstition, no dedication to the vampire as a Romantic figure nor fervent fan’s love of fantasy and horror motivated this exercise. My initial interest in the Vampire is attributable to a disquieted curiosity about the increasing prevalence of deliberately grotesque cultural objects that slowly but surely are filling the world, objects that seem to emanate from some cultural plasma out of which forgotten totems, gods, and mythologies recombine into icons of virtual beliefs seemingly handed down to us by ances- tors not our own. At a time when practices of self-mutilation, fetishism, and degradation flourish, fantasy is given precedent over practical and prudent behavior and the virtual interpenetrates the real, the grotesque is our lingua franca. Through fiction, film, video games, pixilated avatars, and extruded- resin statuettes the grotesque exists to challenge our evolving global commu- 1 2 Preface nity and its predicates, expressing itself primarily as an often-reiterated question: If the aesthetic object presupposes and projects its natural receptor—f rom materials and production techniques to symbolic language and encoded dis- course—is contemporary cultural production suggesting that, subordinated to a tradition-displacing, commercial cult of the grotesque, humanity has become horrifying to itself? If no pathology, the grotesque constitutes a phenomenon worthy of examination. Following Edmund Burke’s mid–eighteenth century codification of our ideas on the beautiful and the sublime as complementarily charged ele- ments of a dynamic system, a modern poetics has emerged in which the grotesque vies with beauty as art’s object. Congealing through emergent genres, forms, and media concurrent to a period of successive and interrelated transforma- tions so intense as to be termed “revolutions”—rapid demographic shift (urbanization), equally radical changes in prevailing modes of production/dis- tribution of goods (industrialization, development of transportation and com- munication networks) and social organization (democratization, secularization)— the anti–beauty paradigm transported the West from the agrarianism that had endured since the late Neolithic era to the mechanized mercantile societies that began to take form over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In this dawn of the industrial, twilight of the agrarian, the grotesque attained the increasingly dominant position it has maintained ever since, to begin extend- ing its influence beyond the decorative or peripheral to permeate—from underlying structures to overarching themes—entire artworks and modes of creation. The grotesque became its own subject, object, and creative process. Parallel to technological, political, and aesthetic displacements, the processes through which cultural objects became socially enfranchised under- went a polar shift as well: Instead of integrating alien symbols through trans- formative accommodation and recontextualization as traditional cultures had, our post-revolutionary hegemonic culture began to appropriate symbols through assimilative desacralization, decontextualization, and fragmentation, the grotesque often being produced through the promiscuous mating of the sacred and the vulgar, the archaic and the modern, the mythic and the com- mercial. If this tendency began by a Romantic turn towards orientalism, famil- iar titles Tomb Raiders, Dungeons and Dragons, Harry Potter, Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Forsaken Gods suggest the penetration of the cul- tural mainstream this creative process of sacrilegious coupling has more recently enjoyed. The English Gothic and related “paraliteratures,” unwearying carriers of the grotesque’s poetic virus, helped found what Victor Hugo termed “The Third Epoch of Poetry”—our own era—during which the grotesque has become coequal to and dominant over beauty as art’s subject and object. A Preface 3 lively, worldly aesthetic, no longer subservient to notions of the sacred and classic, the grotesque’s premier iconoclastic, confrontational, and enduring genre was Horror; its primordial emblematic antihero, the Vampire. Yet if horror arose with and out of the death of the sacred, it seems that its contin- uation could not have been assured without its ghost, for, surprisingly, horror as perpetuated by the Vampire repeatedly serves to reframe myth. In my book Dionysus Unmasked, being prepared for publication, I main- tain that within the Vampire Tale dwells a Neoplatonist allegory, developed from Thomas Taylor’s understanding of Eleusinian rites, whose Neolithic roots entwine a mythological nexus focused on an agrarian order’s preoccu- pation: the tension between light and dark. The cyclical interplay between those opposing values drives all the great vampire texts to be produced over the succeeding centuries. The Vampire appears as a refugee from earlier ages and revisits the rise of the dying god, a corollary to the development of metallic tools and agriculture, and his cosmetic attainment of supremacy over blood- thirsty fertility goddesses in order to inform cosmic rites of renewal. Con- trasting markedly with other creations of Gothic horror, the Vampire permits, indeed propounds and perpetuates, a sacred discourse. Although the lessons that can be abstracted from the Vampire to inform the grotesque are not the topic of this book, it does seem that the Vampire suggests that the grotesque speaks to a spiritual unease and general alienation from society and ourselves. Remarkably, the Vampire prescribes a spiritual remedy, and it is within this context that Dracula—as aesthetic emblem and synthesizing paragon of earlier vampire texts—was approached. Upon its creation, the English-speaking world critically dismissed the Vampire Tale as abhorrent, grotesque, even as its genius was being hailed on the Continent by the likes of Johann Goethe and Charles Nodier. Continental romantics welcomed the Vampire and rapidly assimilated it into new and evolving forms. The internationalization of the grotesque gained great impetus through Nodier’s insertion of the vampire into the still developing form of melodrama—creating a radical variant that not only placed a Manichean uni- verse in suspenseful imbalance, but plunged its divided protagonist into a metaphysical conflict pitting body against soul. In transforming melodrama, the Vampire’s content projected form. The Vampire has since proved to be a peerless generator of grotesque formal developments and a singular motor for producing modernity and what follows, and whose unique ability to spawn new poetic vehicles has not yet been exhausted. Stoker’s Victorian novel, though separated from the literary Gothic by any close historic standard, insists on allying itself in subject matter and style with the Gothic—echoes of Emily St. Aubert’s coach ride to Udolpho being heard at once in Jonathan Harker’s journal—and most closely with its horror
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