Analyzing the Greatest Horror Novel - Dracula by Bram Stoker - The Re-Enchanting of an Englishman

And the Disenchanting of a Vampire

Dinner doesn’t exactly begin with a bang for Jonathan Harker, so much as it began with a fairly straightforward if polite exchange with his host, the Count Dracula. It happens though that before dinner is finished, a letter was given over from him to the Count, one that was soon shown to the youth and that filled him with warmth.

Now with the recomendation letter aside, and dully analyzed in the last essay, we must move forward to a most peculiar scene. One in which we get some manner of insight not into Jonathan’s character, but this time into Dracula’s.

And the insight we get is interesting, because it shows a very different man. One with a tendency towards a trait we don’t think much about these days, trapped as we are in this modern age. And what is that tendency?

There’ve been talks lately on Substack and for some time, notably involving Morgoth and

John Carter

both of whom are insistent that we must ‘re-enchant’ the world. That when modernity struck, we as ‘Western’ Civilizations lost something of the old world’s enchanted vision of the world. We lost touch with our very roots and in a way our core values and visions for the world.

In this way, there is a hole to be found there where faith, spirituality and our connection to our homelands once was. In the case of the people of France, they stopped looking on the mountains and lily-fields and like the people of Scotland and Ireland, thinking there were fairies to be found there, and avoided. The people of Germany lost the fire in their breast that had made them the terror of Middle-Europe and Eastern-Europe and replaced that fire with cold statistics and such, and Scandinavians lost something of their passion for the seas, forgot the ‘Elves’ and their own love of songs and fear of the howling darkness of winter-nights. But with all these things went something of the innermost light that inhabits our being.

Because certainly one could say that we’ve become more logical and what not, which to an extent we have, but we’ve also become lost and more gullible when the government tells us what to do (see the Covid responses of many nations). It happens that we are all lost, we all lash out online and we all seem to no longer believe in anything greater than ourselves, and are losing some measure of our attachment to music, books and art. Our ability to produce these things have become ever more distant from us, so that with the inner-light of our beings, the ‘Elf-Light’ of sorts that we have and that bound us to our languages, homelands and mountains, rivers, glens and fields, we have lost some important part of ourselves.

The return of this ‘Elf-Light’ as I’m jokingly calling it is inevitable, but it will not return gently as the ‘disenchanted’ world becomes ‘enchanted’ once more.

In Dracula’s case though, there is less a kind of ‘Elf-Light’ (also as a reference to Tolkien come to think of it), and more of a kind of Morgothian Darkness that fills the whole of his undead being.

““Listen to them— the children of the night. What music they make!””

Naturally this is the most popular line from the 1932 movie, and this is because Bela Lugosi did a great job with it. While a superb actor, the line though has almost become a meme, and the original meaning has become steadily lost.

What is the meaning? Well there are several. The actual plot one is that the wolves like all ‘children of the night’ are under the dominion of the Nosferatu, Vampires and are therefore in a way children in comparison to Dracula.

On a thematic level he has more in common with the wolves currently out and about, hunting in the night for sheep and other prey they might find. This is because Drac is in essence a wolf in human flesh hunting after men and women.

And then there’s the fact that likely during the day he longs for the moon, for the chance to hunt (men and beasts when one considers he can transform into a wolf), and so the wolf’s howl speaks to some primordial element deep within the monster’s being (one cannot say soul, for he lost that some time ago with the real Vlad likely kept prisoner deep within him waiting to be put to rest that he might return to God).

But in comparison to the line that follows this is nothing.

““Ah, sir, you dwellers in the city cannot enter into the feelings of the hunter.””

This is a fascinating line of dialogue, for it hints at the knowledge that Dracula is a hunter true, but also at the fact that Jonathan at present like all modern urbanites are prey and little more than cattle and rats for Dracula to poach for his own pleasure and hunger.

Yet there’s some element of truth to it, as people in the cities cannot properly it seems connect with nature, with the glens, the rivers, the mountains and the fields, or the vast seas. They are trapped within a concrete prison which blunts their connection to the world around them, and that severs their connection to themselves.

It is no wonder that Urbanites as I call them, always or at least more frequently vote left or for cosmopolitan policies. Why? Because the more resources the city gets, the more people it gets the more influence, money and power the city gains. In a lot of ways there’s a collectivist element to urban areas and her subjects, as they vote the same way, think the same way and operate with the same preconditioned views.

There are some who are different to be sure. An Urbanite in Japan will often view Japan as an ethnostate rather than as just a thing to be filled up with as many people as possible. But this goes back centuries as Japan has always combined in a rather Celtic way nature with the city-planning.

That said, there are those who run counter to this of course. But for the most part there is in a great many cities around the world throughout the Americas, Europe, Africa and growing parts of Arabia a deepening disconnect to their individual nations. This is because the city-states are all part of the same global nation, and share the same ‘religious mission’ to sanctify and expand their ‘god’s power with the city being their god.

Many of these cities have grown through the import of millions of foreigners who don’t always mix well with the local culture or the nation, this has been usually to the satisfaction of the people of the city. Just to speak from a personal stance, I’ve observed how a great many of my friends who have moved to the cities in Canada, have usually taken on ever more globalist views of the world, and come to regard Canadians and Quebecois from the country as inferior, disgusting and lazy. This is their justification for massive immigration, and the subjugation of nature.