A funny thing happened as electronic readers have become more popular: So have regular books.
_____________________________________
This New Yorker article is occasioned by a new annotated Dracula, but I'm linking to it here because it includes the finest reading of Bram Stoker's work I've ever seen. Here's a taste:
Most of this tale of the irrational is filtered through minds wedded to rationalism. “Dracula” has what Noël Carroll, in “The Philosophy of Horror” (1990), called a “complex discovery plot”—that is, a plot that involves not just the discovery of an evil force let loose in the world but the job of convincing skeptics (which takes a lot of time, allowing the monster to compound his crimes) that such a thing is happening. No people, we are told, were more confident than the citizens of Victorian England. The sun never set on their empire. They were also masters of science and technology. “Dracula” is full of exciting modern machinery—the telegraph, the typewriter, the “Kodak”—and the novel has an obsession with railway trains, probably the nineteenth century’s most crucial invention. The new world held no terrors for these people. Nevertheless, they were bewildered by it, because of its challenge to religious faith, and to the emotions religion had taught: sweetness, comfort, reverence, resignation. . . When Professor Abraham Van Helsing, the venerable Dutch physician who becomes the head of the vampire-hunting posse, suggests to his colleague John Seward that there may be a vampire operating in their midst, Seward thinks Van Helsing must be going mad. “Surely,” he protests, “there must be some rational explanation of all these mysterious things.” Van Helsing counters that not every phenomenon has a rational explanation: “Do you not think that there are things in the world which you cannot understand, and yet which are?” Throughout the novel, these self-assured people have to be convinced, with enormous difficulty, that there is something beyond their ken.
______________________________________
Just stumbled upon this series from Granta: "Portrait of my Father."
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
0 comments:
Post a Comment