Dracula's Crypt: Bram Stoker, Irishness, and the Question of Blood (review)

Over the past decade Dracula has passed into a new phase of its increasingly hectic afterlife. Consigned for most of the twentieth century to the margins of serious academic discussion, Bram Stoker's 1897 novel can now be found near the center of some of the more lively, not to say contentious, critical debates of the early twenty-first century. As even a quick trawl through the MLA Bibliography reveals, Dracula studies have grown exponentially in recent years, in part because Stoker's text has proven so useful to critics of all methodological bents. Dracula, like Dracula, is an accomplished shape-shifter, able to take on whatever critical contours a given situation appears to call for. As Joseph Valente notes a bit ruefully at the start of Dracula's Crypt, the novel has "emerged as an all-purpose allegory" (1), of use to critics committed to a wide range of often antithetical agendas. Indeed, Stoker's novel has become one of those privileged textual sites where literary critics meet to do battle over matters not simply exegetical but more broadly methodological.

As its subtitle indicates, Dracula's Crypt seeks to intervene in what Valente calls "Irish Dracula" studies, arguably the most fertile field of Stoker scholarship throughout the 1990s. Thanks to patient, painstaking, ingenious work by David Glover, Michael Valdez Moses, Cannon Schmitt, and Seamus Deane among others, Dracula is now, in Valente's words, "certified to be Hibernian in its roots, its rhetoric, and, less systematically, its referents" (1). These critics helped shift attention to the Irish contexts informing Stoker's career and writings, contexts which they showed to be indispensable to an understanding of Dracula. That such contexts remained so long unnoticed was due in part to the parochialism of Anglo-American literary criticism, but it was also due to the assumption that Stoker was himself largely uninterested in Irish issues. The "Irish Dracula" school as a whole sought to dispel that assumption, just as it sought to revise the longstanding view of Stoker as, at best, an unconscious artist—which is to say not an artist at all but merely a conduit through which a particularly potent cultural myth happened to pass on its way to textuality. In the hands of Glover and Moses especially, Stoker was suddenly revealed to be an author with intentions. Much of the subsequent debate has been over what those intentions were and how they are enacted in his fictions.

The issue of intentionality is at the heart of Valente's book. He contends, in the strongest possible terms, that Stoker was an artist of surpassing subtlety, sophistication, and self-awareness. Where other critics perceive (and then make allowance for) a "stylistic and structural incoherence" running through his fictions, Valente finds in Dracula especially "a carefully wrought stylistic and structural complexity" that calls for, and then amply rewards, the closest critical scrutiny (5). In Valente's view, we need to recognize that Stoker belongs in the company not of H. Rider Haggard and G. A. Henty but of Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, and James Joyce. More than that, Valente's Stoker uncannily anticipates some of the central insights of "post-structural, postmodern, and postcolonial" criticisms (25). These and similar claims, which far exceed those made on Stoker's behalf by any previous critic, are likely to strike many readers as counterintuitive. It is therefore worth asking why he insists on them so often and with such passion.

One answer seems to be that Valente is not entirely sure what status his own arguments, which are unfailingly subtle and persuasive, would have were they to come unmoored from the anchor of authorial intentionality. The last two-thirds of Valente's book is devoted to a close—it is difficult for me to imagine a closer—reading of Dracula, the thrust of which is to demonstrate...