in our veins flows the blood of many brave races who fought as the lion fights, for lordship. Here, in the whirlpool of European races, the Ugric tribe bore down from Iceland the fighting spirit which Thor and Wodin gave them, which their Berserkers displayed to such fell intent on the seaboards of Europe, aye, and of Asia and Africa, too, till the peoples thought that the were-wolves themselves had come. . . . When was redeemed that great shame of my nation, the shame of Cassova [Kosovo], when the flags of the Wallach and the Magyar went down beneath the Crescent; who was it but one of my own race who as Voivode crossed the Danube and beat the Turk on his own ground! This was a Dracula indeed!342
A seventeenth-century portrait of Vlad Dracul or Vladislaus Dracula, recently discovered in the Wurtenberg State Library, Germany.
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Count Dracula's seat is in Transylvania. This is his umbilicus mundi, the navel of his world, the landscape that feeds his imagination, if not his body, since as time goes by it becomes difficult for him to find fresh blood in his native mountains, and he is forced to seek material nourishment abroad. "I long to go through the crowded streets of your mighty London," says the count, "to be in the midst of the whirl and rush of humanity, to share its life, its change, its death, and all that makes it what it is."343 But wherever Dracula travels, he cannot be wholly parted from his home. The books on his dusty shelves chronicle his ancient story; all other libraries hold no interest for him. His castle with its ancestral library is his only real home, and he must always have with him a boxful (or coffinful) of the native earth in which he is so deeply rooted. Like Antaeus, he must touch his mother earth or die.
I put Bram Stoker's novel away and reach for a second book, a few shelves above it. It tells the story of another traveller, one whose monstrous features the book hints at but never quite reflects. Like Count Dracula, this wanderer is also a lonely gentleman resolved that no one shall be his master, but unlike the count, he has no illusions about his aristocracy. He has no home, no roots, no ancestry. "I possessed no money, no friends, no kind of property,"344 he tells us. He moves through the world like an exile from nowhere; he is a citizen of the cosmos because he is a citizen of no place. "I am content to suffer alone, while my sufferings shall endure,"345 he says in resignation. He teaches himself through books, collecting in his memory a curious and eclectic library. His first readings are vicarious;
he listens to a family of peasants read out loud, somewhat implausibly, a philosophical meditation on universal history, C.-F. Volney's Ruins of Empires. "Through this work," he explains, "I obtained a cursory knowledge of history, and a view of the several empires at present existing in the world; it gave me an insight into the manners, governments, and religions of the different nations of the earth." He wonders how human beings can be "at once so powerful, so virtuous, and magnificent, yet so vicious and base?" For this he has no answer, but even though he feels he is "not even of the same nature as man,"346 he nevertheless loves humankind and wishes to belong to the human realm. A lost suitcase full of clothes and books provides him with a few other readings: Milton's Paradise Lost, Plutarch's Lives and Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther. From Werther he learns "despondency and gloom," from Plutarch "high thoughts." But Paradise Lost moves him with a sense of wonder. "As I read," he says, "I applied much personally to my own feelings and condition. I found myself similar, yet at the same time strangely unlike the beings concerning whom I read, and to whose conversation I was a listener. I sympathized with, and partly understood them, but I was unformed in mind; I was dependent on none, and related to none."347 In spite of finding glimmers of his own story in the story of the fallen Adam, this bewildered reader finds that, however much he reads, human libraries do not account for him. Notwithstanding his eagerness to be part of the universal audience, this citizen of the world will be hounded from the world, will be scorned as a foreigner in every sense, as a creature beyond the pale of every society. Miserable, feared and hated, he will cause the death of his own maker, and finally Dr. Frankenstein's monster will lose himself forever in the ice of the North Pole, inside the frozen blank page known as Canada, the dumping ground of so many of the world's fantasies.
Frankenstein's monster is both the utter foreigner and the perfect world citizen; he is alien in every way, a horror to look upon, and yet made up of all manner of human pieces. Learning like a child for the first time the nature of the world and of himself, he is the archetypal lector virgo, the curious being willing to be taught by the open page, a visitor to the library of the world carrying no prejudices or experience to colour his reading. When the monster enters the blind hermit's cottage, he pronounces these words: "Pardon the intrusion. ... I am a traveller in want of a little rest." A traveller for whom there are no borders, no nationalities, no limitations of space, because he belongs nowhere, the monster must even excuse himself for entering a world into which he has not willingly come, promoted from darkness, in the words of Milton's Adam.348 1 find the phrase "Pardon the intrusion" unbearably moving.
For Frankenstein's monster, the world as described in books is monothematic; all volumes are from the same library. Though he travels from place to place— Switzerland, the Orkneys, Germany, Russia, England and the wilds of Tartary—he sees not the particularities but the common traits of these societies. For him, the world is almost featureless. He deals in abstracts, even though he learns details from various books of history. "I read of men concerned in public affairs governing or
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Illustration by Chevalier for the 1831 edition of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus.
massacring their species. I felt the greatest ardour for virtue arise within me, and abhorrence for vice, as far as I understood the signification of these terms, relative as they were, as I applied them, to pleasure and pain alone."349 And yet these lessons will prove fruitless. Human libraries, the monster will learn, contain for him only alien literature.
At home in a single place and at home in the world are two notions that can both be experienced as negative. Count Dracula trusts only his private library. He prides himself on being boyar (belonging to the Russian nobility), and can scornfully list a number of nationalities he is not. Frankenstein's monster, having no library of his own, looks for his reflection in every book he encounters, and yet never succeeds in recognizing his own story in those "foreign" pages.
And yet the possibility of a greater and deeper experience was always there for either of them. Seneca, echoing Stoic notions from four hundred years earlier, denied that the only books that should matter to us are those of our contemporaries and fellow citizens. According to Seneca, we can pick from any library whatever books we wish to call ours; each reader, he tells us, can invent his own past. He observed that the common assumption— that our parents are not of our choosing—is in fact untrue; we have the power to select our own ancestry. "Here are families with noble endowments," he writes, pointing at his bookshelf. "Choose whichever you wish to belong to. Your adoption will give you not only the name but actually the property, and this you need not guard in a mean or niggardly spirit: the more people you share it with, the greater it will become. . . . This is the sole means of prolonging your mortality, rather than transforming it into immortality." Whoever realizes this, says Seneca, "is exempt from the limitations of humanity; all ages are at his service as at the service of a god. Has time gone by? He holds it fast in recollection. Is time now present? He makes use of it. Is it still to come? He anticipates it. The amalgamation of all time into one, makes his life long."350 For Seneca, it was not the notion of superiority that mattered (Plutarch made fun of those who considered the moon of Athens superior to the moon of Corinth351) but that of communality, the sharing among all human beings of one common reason under one divine logos. As a consequence, he widened the circle of the self to embrace not only family and friends but also enemies and slaves, as well as barbarians or foreigners, and ultimately the whole of humanity.