Difference between revisions of "Wicke 1992"

Latest revision as of 13:12, 26 February 2017

Wicke, Jennifer. “Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and its Media.” ELH 59.2 (1992): 467-493.

• 467 framing with Marx's Grundrisse: "What chance has Vulcan against Roberts & Co., Jupiter against the lightning-rod and Hermes against the Credit-Mobilier? All mythology overcomes and dominates and shapes the forces of nature...it therefore fanishes with the advent of real mastery over them. What becomes of Fama alongside Printing House Square?"
  • "PRINTING-HOUSE SQUARE. (1) A London court, so called from the former office of the King's Printer, which occupied the site. On it stands the office of the Times." (The New International Encyclopædia, 1905)
• The Grundrisse is Marx's complex meditation on the intertwined fates of production, consumption and distribution, prefaced by these worries about the place of the aesthetic in the modern socioeconomic landscape. Within its novelistic form, Dracula too could be said to pose and to enact the occultation of those three processes, by its privileging of consumption, which consumes the other two. This engorgement is staged by the collision of ancient mythologies with contemporary modes of production.
• Stakes: The argument will turn attention to the technologies that underpin vampirism, making for the dizzy contradictions of htis book, and permitting it to be read as the first great modern novel in British literature.... [468] part of what I hope to show in so pursuing its media are its connections to the everyday life of typewriters, neon, advertisement and neoimperialism we are still living in today. To drain Dracula of some of its obvious terrors may help to highlight the more obvious terrors of modern life.
• [Building on Moretti's analysis in "Dialectic of Fear" which focused on two scales of analysis to understand vampirism: socio-economic and sexual-psychological:] Intervention: I think it is possible, however, to find a way of addressing this text without accepting such hermetically sealed compartments of analysis.
• 469 [Consumption as the hypotenuse between economics and sex]...what I will work through here is the uneasy status of consumption as it is poised between two seemingly exclusionary vocabularies that nonetheless intersect (often invisibly) precisely here
• ...shift the agenda in critical terms to the work that the text can do as a liminal modernist artifact...one could call it a chaotic reaction-formation in advance of modernism, wildly taking on the imprintings of mass culture.
• Key definition: mass culture, the developing technologies of the media in its many forms, as mass transport, tourism, photography and lithography in image production, and mass-produced narrative. To take seriously the status of mass culture in an incipiently mass cultural artifact is to have a privileged vantage on the dislocations and transformations it occasions, especially because Dracula has been so successful in hiding the pervasiveness of the mass cultural within itself, foregrounding instead its exotic otherness.
• [narrative means of production] ...the crucial fact is that all of these narrative pieces eventually comprising the manuscript we are said to have in our hands emanate from radically [470] dissimilar and even state-of-the-art media forms. Dracula, draped in all its feudalism and medieval gore, is textually completely au courant.
• 470 [starting taxonomy of mass culture technologies with Seward's phonograph] Despite the apparent loss of "aura," in Benjamin's sense, ostensibly found in the mechanical reproduction of Seward's diary, what Mina is struck by is the latent emotional power of the recorded voice, whose spectacular emotion the typewriter can strip away.... Seward's diary constitutes the immaterialization of a voice
• 471 [Type/shorthand] Shorthand may seem to fall innocently outside the sphere of mass cultural media, but in fact it participates in one of the most thoroughgoing transformations of cultural labor of the twentieth-century, the rationalization (in Weber's sense) of the procedures of bureaucracy and business, the feminization of the clerical work force, the standardization of mass business writing.
• ...there is a crucial sense in which we are inducted into Count Dracula lore by the insinuation of the invisible, or translated, stenography. This submerged writing is the modern, or mass cultural, cryptogram; the linkage of this mode of abbreviated writing with the consumption process is made apparent by our willingness to invest these abbreviations with the fully-fleshed body of typed and printed writing. Shorthand flows through us, as readers, to be transubstantiated as modern, indeterminate, writing.
• 472 I am trying to give a reading of the society of consumption and its refraction in Dracula, but that society rests on, is impossible without, the imperial economy. It is overly glib to talk about commodity culture without this insistent awareness; what particularly draws me to Dracula, and what makes it a modern text, is the embeddedness there of consumption, gender, and empire.
• [Kodak camera] For a time at the turn of the century, "kodak" meant eye-witness proof
• the photographic evidence Jonathan brings to Count Dracula is also a talismanic offering, a simulacrum of the communion wafer Professor VH will put to (473) Mina's forehead with such disastrously scarring results...photography makes its images in a similarly alchemical, if less liturgical, fashion.
  • why other than its ceremonial functions? In its Christological significance it's surely different -- munging premodernity
• 473 [Journalism] Beyond textual mechanics, however, lies the more intriguing fact that the anonymously-authored newspaper reports are coextensive with, and equally authoritative as, the other voices of [474] the text. The text's action absolutely depends on the inclusion of mass-produced testimony; it absorbs these extraneous pieces within itself just as Dracula assimilates the life-blood of his victims.
• 475 Dracula's individual powers all have their analogue in the field of the mass cultural; he comprises the techniques of consumption.
• Mass culture is protean, with [476] the same horrific propensity to mutate that also defines Dracula's anarchic power, as he becomes a bat or a white mist at will.
• 476 The gender division of labor in consumption strongly pervades the representation of this mass cultural vampire and helps to situate Dracula unmistakably as a figure for consumption.
• Mass culture or consumption can be said to transform culture from within the home, despite the obvious fact that many of its cultural technologies are encountered elsewhere, in the department store, on the billboard, in the nickelodeon parlor, at the newsstand or the telegraph office. The book is obsessed with all these technological and cultural modalities, with the newest of the new cultural phenomena, and yet it is they that shatter the fixed and circumscribed world the novel seems [477] designed to protect through those very means, as the home is opened up to the instabilities of authority and the pleasures that lie outside the family as a unit of social reproduction.
• 477 It may seem that I accept the text's ambivalence about mass cultural transformation in connecting Dracula to it, but what I want to propose is a very different spin on the notion of consumption -- the need to see it as, as Pierre Bourdieu calls it, "the production that is consumption." These changes are extraordinary and have powerful political effects; they are also, as I have claimed, premised on a cannibalization of resources from invisible places "elsewhere," in global economic terms.
• The vampiric embrace is now a primary locus for our culture's self-reflexive assessment of its cultural being, since that being is fixed in the embrace of material consumption.
• 478 [transition to close readings of production/consumption]
• 479 Dracula's own biorhythms are, paradoxically, very much those of everyday life under the altered conditions of the mass cultural; Dracula must consume on a daily basis. The outlandishness of Dracula's behavior is simultaneously made quotidian, regularized, indeed, everyday, in the extended sense that word is given by Henri Lefebvre.
• Once the mass cultural makes its appearance it unleashes pleasure, it transforms attention, it mobilizes energies outside the norms of authority. I'm not giving this a utopian cast, simply remarking on the rearrangements of hte social and the psychic consumption exacts, nowhere more specifically than in the realm of sexuality. The modern discourse of sexuality is indeed based on consumption, as Foucault's work has demonstrated, and recently Lawrence Birkin's book has annexed sexology to the epistemic shift of consumption. Dracula bears this out. The history of mass culture is at least in part the history of regaining and reasserting control over sexuality; in Dracula, this battle is still so new that the enemy is us.
• 480-1 [Reading of Mina putting mud on her feet when she retrieves Lucy so no one will see them bare] The text's surface establishes the two women's purity and asexuality, yet slips in a glimpse of their susceptibility to consumption - a consumption that also demarcates them favorably in opposition to the New Women who eschew marriage and home. You're damned if you do, and damned if you don't consume.
• 484 Yet more is entertained here than just the effacement of Lucy as a female character; what I want to urge is that there is a dialectical intertwining of the racial and national on the one hand, and consumption and femaleness on the other, that roughens such tidy analyses. It makes a difference that Lucy is the victim, so to speak, of the group of men who accompanied one another on their colonial voyages and who, as Quincey Morris puts it, "told yarns by the camp-fire in the prairies"... Their investment in expunging Lucy the vampire is inflected by this mutual history, and by Lucy's emblematic status as Western icon [Westenra on 482-3, a bit much if you ask me]
• 485 Consumption is psychosexual, yet also socioeconomic. Mina occupies a strange niche between these two, since she is consumed by Dracula, who banquets on her, and also consumes him, but wihtout longing, without desire, and with all her cognitive faculties intact. She could be said to be a perfect replica of the labor of consumptino in this regard: she is always doing something with it, always consciously co-present with the act, unlike Lucy's white zombiedom. The text wants ot protect itself from Mina's brain, from her knowledge. After her vamping, the men alternately need to tell her everything, and want to tell her nothing. Oscillating back and forth between these positions, Mina becomes more and more the author of hte text; she takes over huge stretches of its narration, she is responsible for giving her vampire-hunting colleagues all information on Dracula's whereabouts, and she is still the one who coordinates and collates the manuscripts, although she has pledged the men to kill her if she becomes too vampiric in the course of time. Her act of collation is by no means strictly secretarial, either; Mina is the one who has the idea of looking back over the assembled manuscripts for clues to Dracula's habits and his future plans. Despite the continual attempts both consciously by the characters and unconsciously by the text itself to view Mina as a medium of transmission, it continually emerges that there is no such thing as passive transmission, -- invariably, intelligent knowledge is involved, and Mina goes to the heart of things analytically and structurally.
  • Really solid reading of Mina as medium of mass production/consumption
• 486: ...Mina's prescience and logical ability are predicated on her proximity to the mass cultural forms she has mastered: for example, her hobby is memorizing the train schedule, since she is, in her own words, "a train fiend," which allows her to recreate Dracula's line of escape. Additionally, she is a typist with a portfolio.
• [building on Anderson "imagined communities," "print-languages"] As much as it is extruded, so to speak, in and through the modern technologies of production that elsewhere the text so abhors, so also the text relies on pushing at the limits of the common language of English to mark out its natural boundary, and controlling the unruliness of speech by technologizing it - typing it - as a print language of hegemony.
• 489: The national "has an inner compatibility with empire," acutely shown in the predicaments that Dracula helps to reveal. The empire fans out across the globe, collecting its grab-bag of completely incongruous possessions, while at the same time the maintenance of a national community back in the metropole, as it were, siphons off tremendous amounts of ideological energy. "From the start," Anderson claims, "the national was conceived in language, not in blood, and [one] could be invited into the imagined community." Such an invitation would rest on linguistic grounds, language being a synecdoche for cultural solidarity. And the only means of producing a language center on a vast enough scale too indeed make a nation lay in and through the techniques of mass cultural dissemination.
• Dracula's last attack on the vampire group is not represented in his taking over of Mina's soul; before he departs from London, Dracula mounts an attack on language, the language of print culture itself [burning their archive].
• 490: If compying is the inevitable fate of the mass-produced, here it is also the salvation. The vampire hunters do not need sacral, original, authentic or auratic texts - copies will do, the more reproduced the better. Dracula's pyrotechnic outrage implies the desire for a primal relation to texts, and certainly a desire to replace writing with speech, but his little apocalypse in the fireplace cannot succeed in annihilating the reproductive powers of technologized language.
• 491: The novel doesn't forget its complex relation to the techniques of modernity, however; the religious apotheosis is not its last gasp. Dracula is an unstable brew, because it is made up out of mass cultural forms, and yet tries to use this loose collection to mount a retrogressive search and destroy mission against itself.
• What makes this text so modern, not to say modernist, is that it knows that it will be consumed - it stages the very act of its own consumption, and problematizes it. The energies [492] of modernity flow out of these same ineluctable wounds, and the undecidable nature of consumption. Most of all, the modernist text follows Dracula in acknowledging, however repressedly, the necessary relation of the modern world to its dialectical other, the rest of the world. In that encounter, which Dracula enacts, a modernist writing begins.