The notion itself seems laugh­able. The propo­si­tion of a pro­gres­sion from ‘nor­mal­ity’ to ‘com­edy’ to hor­ror as one trav­els east­wards (from Eng­land in Stoker’s Drac­ula) seems… well, itself very for­eign. Only not for­eign in any sub­stan­tiable kind of way, more in a “you lied about where you went when on hol­i­days, didn’t you” sce­nario. His lan­guage is reflec­tive firstly of his for­eign­ness, but this for­eign­ness is less mod­ern, and more attuned to the pow­ers of “old Europe” than Eng­land per­haps is. We see moder­nity through a dis­tinctly British lense, whereby com­pet­ing pow­ers are com­pletely mar­gin­alised and it is all reduced (seem­ingly) to a dichoto­mous strug­gle between her­itage and con­tem­po­rary being. It will be noted, also, that until the twelvth cen­tury or there­abouts (maybe later, even), England/Ireland/Scotland/Wales were con­sid­ered as bar­barous and unde­vel­oped as the (Far East) and Mus­lim pow­ers… moder­nity splits this, per­haps, into future poten­tial ver­sus present as-yet-undefeated cur­rency of being (I love that phrase, Com­mu­nist influ­ences or not) in a sense of antiquity.

Also, one mustn’t make the mis­take of con­fus­ing antiq­uity as lin­eage. MH’s first lec­ture drew atten­tion to ‘the whirlpool of Euro­pean races’ in Dracula’s third chap­ter (though I wasn’t at the lec­ture, it’s online in Pow­er­point for­mat) which, notably, refers only to con­ti­nen­tal Euro­pean influ­ences. There is pre­served an irrev­o­ca­ble dis­tinc­tion between ‘Europe’ (which, it seems, is an old power with­out the same sense of embrac­ing moder­nity — notably Ger­many and Rus­sia are gen­er­ally ignored in this text) and ‘Eng­land’ (even includ­ing Amer­ica, by a char­ac­ter link).

Hels­ing is still ‘other’. His oth­er­ness is not that of cheap laughs, but of blended encoun­ters with sav­age forces lurk­ing fur­ther to the East. (IMO, of course :))

Tags: America, Europe, Far East, Germany, Ireland, Russia, Scotland, United Kingdom, Van Helsing, Wales