Introduction: The Irish Question
The history of Ireland presents all the symptoms of colonialism—conquest, dispossession, and exploitation; persecution, genocide, and mass migration; loss of culture, language, and identity—all complicated by resistance and collaboration, resettlement and hybridization, protracted civil conflict, and a struggle for independence. Despite these credentials, the country has not always qualified for the “postcolonial” epithet. Within Irish studies in the 1980s and 1990s, the application of a postcolonial framework was especially resisted by revisionist historians who, from the late 1960s onward, had challenged traditionally nationalist historiography with a purportedly objective and value-neutral approach to the troubled events of the past. In Ireland and Empire (2000), a comprehensive review and critique of postcolonial scholarship, Stephen Howe passed “largely negative judgements about the empirical, theoretical and political adequacy” of the framework, contending that analyses of the matter of Ireland should be located in “a more appropriate European context.”Footnote 1 Joe Cleary has identified at least three consistently cited objections to the postcolonial framework: Ireland is an integral part of (western) Europe and bears more comparison with other minor countries of the region than with the overseas colonies of its major powers; the goal of establishing an independent state was consistently conceived in nationalist rather than in anticolonialist terms; the people of Ireland were to some extent partners and beneficiaries in the global imperialist project.Footnote 2
Writing in The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature (2012), Cleary still feels compelled to open with the question, “Was Ireland a colony?” and offers counter-justifications to the effect that it was, in fact, “one of the earliest and most thoroughly colonized regions of the British Empire.”Footnote 3 If the structural composition of Irish society was indeed “objectively colonial in character,”Footnote 4 the application of a postcolonial frame does not necessitate the displacement of alternative critical perspectives. Even Howe is willing to concede “the appropriateness and importance of seeing some aspects of Irish history in a British Empire framework”;Footnote 5 on that basis alone, Irish historiography can surely benefit from the application of a theoretical framework that is applied as a matter of course in the case of countries that present a less contentiously postcolonial profile. If such a positioning of Ireland is a cause of controversy, it is nonetheless a reminder of the need to avoid a reduction of the postcolonial to a binary opposition of colonizer and colonized, as much as it highlights the fact that historical and contemporaneous experiences of (post)colonialism differ in the case of each and every country concerned. As has been suggested, “the most sensible approach to what has never been, nor ever can be, a totalizing system, is to simply yield to its multiple and varied conditions.”Footnote 6
Cleary’s insistence that modern Irish literature in both English and Gaelic is “intimately connected to [a] traumatic history of colonialism”Footnote 7 has not been generally supported either within or outside of Irish studies. Given persistent tendencies to infer “an especial relationship between emergent, aspiring national identities and the narrative form”Footnote 8 and to associate “postcolonial literature” with contemporary creative writing that responds to the experience of colonialism with resistance, the problems raised by Irish literature are clear. There exists a body of works that is already centuries old, many of the authors of which are not only canonized as key figures in the history of literature in English generally but, in many respects, are indispensible to it. Throughout its history, the country has been and continues to be fully integrated within the metropolitan literary market—indeed, the most generous literary prize for works published in the English language is the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award—and work by creative writers of the post-independence period can hardly be considered to be driven by a consciousness of writing back to the metropole. Perhaps for these reasons and others related to “methodological pitfalls and institutional subtext[s]” of postcolonialism as an academic discipline,Footnote 9 Ireland was conspicuously absent from the list of “post-colonial literatures” championed by The Empire Writes Back, in both its first and second revised editions (1989/2002).Footnote 10
Despite their implicit disqualification of Irish literature, Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin’s definitions of the “post-colonial” suggest the opening of a critical space in which to position an Irish perspective. The term is applied by them not only in reference to “the world as it exists during and after the period of European imperial domination and the effects of this on contemporary literatures” but also as that which is “most appropriate […] for the new cross-cultural criticism which has emerged in recent years and for the discourse through which this is constituted.”Footnote 11 According to Raphaël Ingelbien, the application of such a discourse in the study of Irish literature since the 1980s has involved something in the order of “a series of transfers or shifts of emphasis, rather than a radical expansion of the canon of literature in English.”Footnote 12 Reiterating the distinction between writing back and rereading implied by Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, he notes that it is this latter “other variant” of response to the experience of colonialism that has dominated Irish studies; far from presenting a limitation in the field, when “[c]ompared with the advantages that accrue to the adoption of postcolonial rereading, the exclusion of Ireland by proponents of postcolonial writing back seems a small price to pay.”Footnote 13
Although Ingelbien is writing as recently as 2009, the distinction he draws has become something of a moot point in discourses of postcolonialism. Ato Quayson had noted a decade prior that the reduction of postcolonial literature to writing back precludes a more nuanced perspective by imposing “a singular (and in many respects distorted) view of what postcolonial writing aspires to, and what kind of politics it imagines itself engaged in.”Footnote 14 In his introduction to the recently published The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies (2013), Graham Huggan alludes briefly to the “now virtually defunct ‘writing back’ model” only to take it to task for its tendencies to reinscribe postcolonialism as a “reactive idiom” driven by oppositions of colonizer and colonized.Footnote 15 That a distinction between creative writing back and academic rereading is not only moot but a false one in the particular case of Irish studies is perhaps nowhere more succinctly indicated than in Seamus Deane’s declaration that “[e]verything, including our politics and our literature, has to be rewritten—i.e. re-read”—in order to “enable new writing, new politics.”Footnote 16 Although “securely Irish,” these are to be “unblemished by Irishness,” which is to say of the type associated with traditional nationalism—whether of the unionist or the republican kind—which, like writing back, serves only to reinforce the binary order of colonialism.Footnote 17
The declaration by Deane was made under the auspices of the Field Day Theatre Company, the foundation of which in 1980 in Derry City—at the height and in the cockpit of the “Troubles”—was “a constitutive moment in the emergence of postcolonial studies in Ireland.”Footnote 18 In response to a situation which was, “above all, a colonial crisis”Footnote 19 and in order to foster “a new discourse for a new relationship” between the divided communities of the island,Footnote 20 the association initiated a threefold enterprise, bringing together creative and academic writers for the production of plays, the dissemination of criticism, and the publication of a new and comprehensive anthology of Irish writing.Footnote 21 Launched several years before the appearance of The Empire Writes Back, the Field Day project resonates with the more nuanced brand of postcolonialism that can be found in contemporary discourse. In regard to the question of whether Ireland qualifies for consideration therein, a review of criticism of the time suggests that the country is not of occasional but of consistent relevance, most especially to current debates on the subject of postcolonial revisionism. The following considers attempts to revise Irish literature, and Gothic fiction in particular, which provided a context for various revisions conducted in the 1990s and early 2000s of the novel Dracula (1897) by the Irish author Bram Stoker (1847–1912).
Revisionism and the Postcolonial Irish Gothic
In his introduction to The Oxford Handbook, Huggan takes interest in exploring the current and potential status of postcolonialism as a form of critical revisionism. This is variously defined by him as “a way of returning to the inspirational beginnings of revolution without necessarily endorsing its determinate ends”Footnote 22 and involves a twofold purpose of intervention “in the interstices between cultural critique and political advocacy”Footnote 23 and reclamation “directed at the colonial past and assessing its legacies for the present.”Footnote 24 Citing Edward Said’s attitude of “critical consciousness,”Footnote 25 he argues that critical revisionism exceeds a practice of politically motivated rereading in being “a committed if nonpartisan act in which cultural critique is brought into line with political engagement.”Footnote 26 Although, thus reconfigured, postcolonialism meets the demands of contemporary critique with a historically informed analysis of the “shifting politics of textual representation,”Footnote 27 Huggan makes a point of dissociating “historical revisionism” from its literary counterpart, “critical rereading,” or, more specifically, the type of antagonistic rereading of canonical Western texts that flourished in literary departments during the 1980s and 1990s. Conceding that there are similar reactive tendencies in historical revisionism,Footnote 28 he argues nonetheless that it is this brand of postcolonial critical revisionism that proceeds from the position that history is open to contending political agendas and to the contentious interpretations based upon them.Footnote 29
Writing more than two decades prior, Deane is essentially in agreement with Huggan when advocating a type of postcolonial critical revisionism over an Irish historical revisionism, which, although it had succeeded in “demolish[ing] the nationalist mythology,” had foreclosed the possibility of an alternative “systematic explanation” by “localiz[ing] interpretation” in relation to particular groups, classes, periods, and interests.Footnote 30 Where Deane substantially differs from Huggan is in regard to the question of literature. Rebuking Irish historical revisionists for having paid “no serious attention to the realm of culture,”Footnote 31 he explains that the goal of the Field Day project is precisely to subject the “interweave of political and cultural (largely literary) forces” to a fresh form of analysis that might begin “to reverse the effects of the colonialism that has wrought such devastating as well as subtle effects in Ireland.”Footnote 32 Already a type of intervention, Deane’s brand of literary revisionism is also one of reclamation, or repossession, specifically of the work of writers who had been assimilated to the canons or contexts of British and international literatures. The benchmarking Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, edited by Deane and published initially in three volumes in 1991, is a monument to the recuperation of these and other writers in order to “repossess their revolutionary and authoritative force for the here and now of the present in Ireland.”Footnote 33
The Field Day selection was inevitably controversial, particularly in regard to its effective masculinization of Irish literary history, which was belatedly amended by the publication of additional volumes on “women’s writing” by an all-female editorial board (2002). Another source of contention was a certain gothicization of that history, which can be interpreted in part as an attempt to valorize an alternative to a peculiarly British and therefore hegemonic standard of realism. W. J. McCormack’s article “Irish Gothic and After” traces a line of descent from largely forgotten novelists of the 1790s through Charles Maturin, Lady Morgan, Sheridan Le Fanu, William Carleton, Oscar Wilde, and Bram Stoker to W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge, and Elizabeth Bowen. Although McCormack cautions that “Irish gothic writing does not amount to a tradition,”Footnote 34 the notion of such a lineage does remain alluring. Hoping to incorporate its discontinuities, Jarlath Killeen proposes that it resembles a “Gothic edifice, full of suggestive gaps, obscure corners, imposing promontories (the “great” works), fractures, fragments.”Footnote 35 If its Irishness derives from “the fact that the writers had some important Irish connection, dealt with Irish issues, and were partially influenced by (or at least vaguely aware of) an Irish line of precursors,”Footnote 36 it is also a specifically Anglo-Irish tradition in that its fictions are the reflections of “a ‘colonial’ history, Protestantism, and the fear of marginalisation.”Footnote 37
Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which had already been psychoanalyzed, socio-historically contextualized, and allegorically interpreted on the basis of nineteenth-century discourses such as degeneration theory and criminal anthropology, became the object of an “Irish” turn in critical interest that coincided with the Field Day revision of literary history at the beginning of the 1990s. From such a perspective, the novel stands out as one of the most “imposing promontories” of Killeen’s “Gothic edifice,” and an attentive rereading would presumably disclose the colonial history that lurks beneath the metropolitan surface of the text. The “monstrous Other,” the form in which an Anglo-Irish Protestant Gothic is “bound up in the depiction of Irish Catholics,”Footnote 38 certainly finds a worthy representative in the eponymous Count, who “must be staked […] so too, the version of Ireland as atavistic must be banished.”Footnote 39 The narrative does not conclude with the death of the vampire, however, but with the birth to Mina and Jonathan Harker of a child, whose advent symbolizes a hope of renewal notwithstanding the fact that he has been carried to term by a still half-vampirized mother. As much as the implied hybridization of the child signifies the resilience of the “Other,” it exemplifies the ambivalent (re)solutions of a genre that is characterized by what Killeen describes as “an attraction of repulsion”Footnote 40 toward its matter.
If Killeen’s “colonial” reading fits awkwardly with Deane’s program of revolutionary repossession or with the relationship of revisionism to anticolonialism that, Huggan argues, structures the field of postcolonialism,Footnote 41 there are multiple other “Irish” readings of Dracula that align more readily with these positions. Rejecting the view that the novel mythologizes the struggle of “the Anglo-Protestant garrison,”Footnote 42 Joseph Valente approaches it in terms of the “metrocolonial conditions” of its production. Introduced in the 1990s to qualify reconstructions of James Joyce as a colonial subaltern,Footnote 43 his “metrocolonial” concept applies to “the unique and contradictory position” of Ireland as an “interstitial location between the ruling center and the subjugated margins of the Empire.”Footnote 44 Registered conflictingly by the divided communities of Ireland and inconsistently by their neighbors in Great Britain, the “metrocolonial” is nonetheless a condition that is held in common. As such, it is also of relevance to the issue of reconciliation, which, already current in Irish criticism of the 1980s, is of increasing prominence in contemporary debate.Footnote 45 The ambivalences of the concept resonate with the tensions between reconciliatory and revolutionary strands of postcolonial theory and with the question posed by Huggan—and anticipated by Deane—as to whether their negotiated relationship in a “composite” revisionism might offer “a new, triangulated way of […] accounting for the constitutive contradictions in the postcolonial field.”Footnote 46
Luke Gibbons has argued that the troubled and, for historians, often troubling history of Ireland might be more convincingly conveyed through the tropes of Gothicism than those of realism.Footnote 47 In recent decades, the template suggested by him has been applied in the attempts by some critics to follow the Field Day Anthology in constructing a coherent history of Irish literature. Although McCormack rejects as “doubtful” or “merely convenient” the notion of an Irish Gothic tradition,Footnote 48 he elsewhere qualifies his resistance to the idea of a literary tradition by conceding that a “(sometimes contradictory and violent) convergence of readings,” if not of primary texts themselves, might in itself constitute a tradition.Footnote 49 Extending this assertion, Killeen argues that the corollary of “a very complex, contradictory, ‘violent’ process of textual production and cultural interpretation” is that “critical responses to the use of Gothic themes and tropes would in fact constitute part of the Irish Gothic tradition.”Footnote 50 Much as Count Dracula is wont to exchange his identity as a vampire for that of a bat, a wolf, or a cloud of dust and still go by the same name, his story is liable to switch between original source and critical revisions. The sections that follow will examine revisions of the novel from a postcolonial perspective and consider whether they are indeed necessarily “violent” in their contradictions.
Count Dracula: Ascendancy Landlord or Underclass Immigrant?
Dracula opens with the words of the solicitor Jonathan Harker, who departs from Budapest with the impression of “leaving the West and entering the East,” his conveyance taking him “among the traditions of Turkish rule.”Footnote 51 For postcolonial critics such as Stephen Arata, the early journal entries betray a clear Orientalist perspective, which leads the traveler to describe what he witnesses much less than produce what he has been conditioned to expect.Footnote 52 Continuing into Transylvania, Harker discovers “one of the wildest and least known portions of Europe,”Footnote 53 which, as an “other” space on the eastern edge of the continent, already bears comparison with the Celtic fringe to the West. The region is desolate and depopulated, but also a “whirlpool” of conflicting ethnic groups,Footnote 54 a backwater of superstitious peasantry, and a site of folkloric supernatural occurrences. That the “Irish Question” and the “Eastern Question,” which dominated British domestic politics and determined the government’s foreign policy respectively, often “bore upon and stood in for one another” is, according to Valente, reflected in an “oscillating relationship” of symbolic association that operates throughout the novel.Footnote 55 Focalized through Harker, the model of the Englishman abroad,Footnote 56 “Trans-Sylvania”—literally, “beyond the woods”—threatens to slip “beyond the Pale,” signifying the familiar as well as the strange.Footnote 57
At the end of his unsettling passage through Ireland/Transylvania, Harker is received by Count Dracula, whom many critics, including Deane and Terry Eagleton, have identified as an Anglo-Irish landlord.Footnote 58 The Big House—the distinctive country seat of the Anglo-Irish landowning class, which, beginning with Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800), provided the setting for a great deal of Irish fiction in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—is inevitably evoked by Castle Dracula. Despite its decadent condition and his own shabby appearance, its hermitic occupant is absurdly meticulous in his observation of the etiquette of hospitality, reflecting the futile adherence to tradition by a ruling caste in decline. The Count keeps no servants, suggesting the ostracism meted out to Captain Boycott (1832–1897)—the first victim of a campaign organized against landowners and their agents by the Irish Land League in the 1880s—and, much like the maligned class of estate agents of rural Ireland to which Boycott belonged, it is Szgany minions who do his bidding. If, as Valente contends, Dracula is the exploitative landlord who, for centuries, has sucked the life-blood of the peasantry, his “fatal attachment to his dirt” signifies as “a Gothic figuration of the similarly fatal dependency” of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy upon the land they had occupied.Footnote 59
Expounding at length on the glories of his ancestry, the Count self-identifies as Székely, a subgroup of the Hungarians who, geographically separated from the Magyars, protected the frontier to the East. Like the descendants of the early Anglo-Irish, many of whom were resettled military veterans, Dracula’s position is obsolete. Lamenting that “[t]he warlike days are over […] and the glories of the great races are a tale that is told,”Footnote 60 he spends his time in eccentric isolation, indulging an anglophiliac obsession by reading through a collection of books “all relating to England and English life and customs and manners.”Footnote 61 For Valente, the intent to perfect his grammar and intonation represents “the desperate self-identification with the metropole of a colonial settler class,” presenting symptoms of Homi Bhabha’s “colonial mimicry,” or “the efforts of the superintending colonial elite to imitate and internalize metropolitan norms.”Footnote 62 That the atlas he keeps “open[s] naturally at England, as if that map had been much used,”Footnote 63 suggests, as Eagleton does, that the Count is soon to be the latest in a long line of absentee landlords who, bent on deserting their holdings in the face of their problematic situation in Ireland, had migrated “from the wilds of Connaught to the watering holes of the English south coast.”Footnote 64
It is precisely on the point of his projected relocation to England that critical accounts of an Irish Count Dracula begin to diverge. What upon first impression appear to be mere eccentricities of an aristocrat burdened with an excess of leisure take on a more practical—and sinister—aspect when the Count is observed to have dressed in Harker’s clothing and attempted to pass as his guest in the village. His intent to master the English language by emulating precisely its use by the solicitor reveals less the perfectionism of the hobbyist than the insecurities of a would-be integrationist. If the Count’s uncertainties in regard to his accent and his determination to enter without challenge into English society link him “initially to Irishness,”Footnote 65 as Gibbons argues, it is to an Irishness of a kind radically other than that of the Anglo-Irish landlord. As noted by Deane,Footnote 66 the turbulence of his seaborne migration recalls the passage across the Atlantic of “coffin ships” loaded with refugees from the Great Famine of the 1840s. Dracula arrives in England not as a colonial scion returning home to the metropole but, disembarking under cover of night at a provincial port in the north of the country, as an undocumented and manifestly unwelcome immigrant.
The new arrival makes his way south to London, where he mixes inconspicuously with the local population, keeping a low profile by day and battening on the vulnerable by night. What was a constant, effusive, and overbearing presence at Castle Dracula—as represented in the diary entries of Harker—is conspicuously silenced in the British capital—through the disparate accounts complied by his adversaries—and his actions are apprehended only fleetingly or indirectly through the progression of the “parallel pathologies” of his victims.Footnote 67 For a number of critics, the danger presented by vampirism stands in for the perceived threat to the middle classes of the lumpen proletariat in the large industrialized urban centers of England, a threat typically attached to immigrant groups in particular.Footnote 68 Having deposited his boxes of dirt in disreputable neighborhoods around the heart of the metropolis, Count Dracula has been taken to represent those who, in the course of the nineteenth century, constituted the largest such group. Valente rehearses the contemporary stereotype to which the vampire corresponds: the Irish “live in squalor and spread disease […] they are reckless overbreeders […] they are congenitally and pathologically lawless […] they are alien subversives whose arrival amounts to an ‘invasion’ […] finally, they just drink too much.”Footnote 69
The refiguration of the aristocrat as an underclass immigrant reflects the imbrication of class with race that governed contemporary prejudices against the Irish. If the shape-shifting vampire “incarnates the slippage from racial to species other” to which the Irish were often subjected,Footnote 70 Van Helsing’s categorization of the former as a primitive creature possessed of a “child-brain”Footnote 71 accords with the regular depiction of the latter as imperfectly evolved simians in popular caricature. In scientific discourse, on the other hand, certain strands of evolutionary theory contended that hierarchical distinctions between the races were not immutable and that the superior were vulnerable to degradation and degeneration through association and miscegenation with those of inferior rank.Footnote 72 Writing in 1880, eminent biologist E. Ray Lankester (1847–1929) called for “the protection of our race—even of this English branch of it—from relapse.”Footnote 73 As Gibbons points out, “the ease with which Count Dracula enters the mainstream of British society plays on [such] anxieties,”Footnote 74 for even more terrifying than the vampire itself is the prospect of vampirization. If Harker’s nightmare vision of London’s “teeming millions” being engulfed by “a new and ever-widening circle of semi-demons”Footnote 75 channels a fear of racial corruption through “reverse colonization,”Footnote 76 Dracula’s being driven from the metropolis and destroyed at his point of origin realizes a purging of that fear.
Count Dracula, the Metrocolonial Vampire
The Anglo-Irish landlord in Ireland/Transylvania and the Gaelic-Irish immigrant in England are perhaps the most widely disseminated “Irish” reincarnations of Stoker’s vampire. Although each of these critical figurations is convincing in its own way, the incompatibility of the two has been noted by both Gibbons and Valente, who caution that one is either an agent or an object of colonialism and cannot be both at the same time.Footnote 77 Since 1990, when the publication of Arata’s “The Occidental Tourist” spurred academic interest in unearthing the Irish roots of the character, multiple other such figurations have emerged to further complicate the matter. Bruce Stewart has likened the Count and his minions to radical Land Leaguers, who perpetrated “outrages” of agrarian political violence during the Land War of the late 1800s against absentee and exploitative landlords, or to “gombeen men,” capitalist usurers who emerged during the Great Famine to exploit the desperation of the peasantry.Footnote 78 Michael Valdez Moses proposes that the Count is really Charles Stewart Parnell (1846–1891), the “Uncrowned King of Ireland,” whose leadership of the Home Rule movement threatened to “bring into existence a whole new people, a nation of free Irish citizens,”Footnote 79 the example of whom would spell the end of the British Empire. Still another figuration is advanced by Valente: Count Dracula as a blood-gorged Fenian “sovereignty deity.”Footnote 80
In the face of this proliferation of revisionary readings—not to mention the numerous others related to more metropolitan concerns such as degeneration theory—Ingelbien expresses doubts as to whether the novel can function “as one extended, coherent allegory.”Footnote 81 This is a reasonable misgiving given the inevitable inconsistencies that arise once the various interpretive positions are applied to a reading of Dracula as a whole. Appealing to the commonly voiced deprecation of Stoker’s competence as a writer, he suggests that a “desire for commercial success”—rather than an attention to allegorical consistency—was the chief source of the author’s motivation and, presumably, made a muddle of his intentions.Footnote 82 With regard to the intentions of Stoker’s professional readers, Ingelbien connects the contradictoriness of their interpretations to “critical plurality,” or “a discursive pattern of multiple signification and re-signification” akin to the psychoanalytic category of overdetermination.Footnote 83 He contends, however, that this position remains “a cop-out” if it makes allowance for incompatible critical accounts of the novel without regard to an examination of the conflicts generated by them.Footnote 84 Valente concurs with this conclusion, noting that if critics of the Irish school have alluded to the insufficiency of their own interpretations, they have generally done so without “theorizing those doubts or incorporating them into a more historically capacious account.”Footnote 85
In his own quest to account for the identity of an “Irish” Count Dracula, Valente does not attempt to offer another partial interpretation that will inevitably founder on the excesses of the text; instead, he attends to precisely those “polymorphous” aspects that others might choose to ignore or attempt to excuse.Footnote 86 His contention is that the Irishness of the Count ought to be determined in accordance with the socio-historical conditions of the novel’s production. According to him, the people of Ireland as a whole—irrespective of the often profound differences in experience among the ethnic groups of Anglo-, Gaelic-, and Scots-Irish—were both “agents and objects” of imperialism.Footnote 87 Under the dispensation of the Union of Great Britain and Ireland in 1801, according to which the latter dependency was ostensibly integrated with the metropole while remaining essentially colonial in character, the people of the island collectively occupied “an uneasy social and psychic space” that confounds any attempt to draw a clear division between “authority, agency, and legitimacy” on the one hand and “abjection, heteronomy, and hybridity” on the other.Footnote 88 In corresponding to this condition, for which Valente coins the term metrocolonial, Dracula constitutes an “always already effracted allegory” that will necessarily defeat any attempt to apply a unitary framework.Footnote 89
If the various other “Irish” reincarnations of the Count provoke a denial of recognition on account of their mutual incompatibility, Valente’s vampire represents something of “a coherent indeterminacy,” or “a semiotic space doubling and dividing against itself” in its representation of the metrocolonial condition.Footnote 90 An initial example of such “doubling and dividing” can be intuited in the juxtaposition of England and Ireland/Transylvania and in the movements undertaken between these disjunctive constituencies of the United Kingdom by the Englishman in Ireland and the Ascendancy landlord become underclass immigrant in England. From a critical postcolonial perspective, the doubled identity of the latter is further divided against itself in that the landlord is also a Fenian sovereignty deity, the immigrant is a settler returning to the metropole, and, as much as each of these figurations is at the same time itself and each of the others, they are also Home Ruler, Land Leaguer, gombeen man, and so forth. If an acceptance of such “conflictual overdetermination” means to “muddle his status” as much as to “multiply his pedigree,” it does not imply that the “Irish” vampire is ultimately undecidable but that it is one that is determined according to what Valente describes as a “a full-blown logic of self-alterity.”Footnote 91
It is precisely through this particular logic that the Irishness of Count Dracula “helps to configure other concerns” related directly to it.Footnote 92 The character’s critical reincarnations of an Irish orientation—principally, the landlord and the immigrant—are juxtaposed in such a way as to expose the deleterious effects of colonialism on both agent and object, in an allegory, on the one hand, of the brutalization of both native and settler communities in the colony and, on the other, of the threat of recompense in the form of reverse colonization in the metropole. The metrocolonial vampire that shifts between the center and periphery of empire is both Anglo- and Gaelic-Irish, both of the Ascendancy and of the underclass. These ambivalences work to destabilize the essences of class and race upon which imperialism depends and to privilege an ideal of hybridization that receives its apotheosis in the birth of the child to Mina and Jonathan Harker. Interpreted in this manner, a newly revised version of the novel certainly supports an anticolonial critique; through its continuous flow of suture and rupture, moreover, it epitomizes the unity through diversity that a postcolonial resolution of Ireland’s metrocolonial condition might have achieved—from a unionist perspective—had the rhetoric of Union been followed through with genuine reconciliation.
The metrocolonial condition functions at both the collective level, where it shapes the cultural and political identity of the Irish people as a whole, and the level of the individual, where it lends “a peculiar slant to the psychic terrain of Stoker himself.”Footnote 93 In an examination of the personal background of the author, Valente alludes to his consciousness of being ethnically mixed on account of ancestry and the transmission to him of a “dual cultural inheritance” from his parents.Footnote 94 Emphasizing the opportunities such “contradictory circumstances” afford, he positions an “Anglo-Celtic” author as active and intentional arbiter of the text.Footnote 95 Accordingly, his postcolonial rereading of Dracula is not so much a rewriting of the novel in the sense proposed by Deane as a writing-out in such terms of the tenor of Stoker’s allegory and an underwriting in it of anticolonial resistance and postcolonial reconciliation. Through this critical intervention, the narrative becomes a reflection both of and on colonialism, implements strategies of resistance to colonialism, and suggests solutions that, although developed through colonialism, ultimately lead to the resolution of its inequities and the reconciliation of the parties concerned. The section that follows will consider how these complex positions have been and might be further extended in the context of broader cultural paradigms closely involved with postcolonialism, namely those of (post)modernity.
Count Dracula, the Counter-(Post)Modernist Vampire
Recalling the “multilayered connections” of modernity to colonialism, Huggan notes that one of the main tasks of postcolonialism has been “to seek energetically to intervene in the unfinished history of the modern world.”Footnote 96 Although it can be said of certain currents of what came to be known as modernism that misgivings about the aims and efficacy of modernization occasioned criticism of practices in overseas colonies, the experiences of colonized peoples remained marginal and implicitly discounted by its tendencies toward universalism. If the advocates of postmodernism have embraced alterity, their abandonment of grand narratives may not always suit those who have a vested interest in asserting a postcolonial identity and acceding in their own terms to the benefits of modernity. For these reasons, works of postcolonial literature that share aesthetic concerns with either modernism or postmodernism can be distinguished by their attempt to write an “other” version of modernity that includes “the subjectivity, history, and language of those hitherto suppressed” and, in so doing, to render the discourse of modernity accessible to them.Footnote 97 Theo D’haen has usefully described such works as “counter-discourses”, which are “complementary or ‘supplemental’” to those of “orthodox” (post)modernism,Footnote 98 and his concept and terminology are as applicable to the work of critical revisionists as they are to that of creative writers.
As Huggan notes, “one of the few generally agreed-upon tasks of postcolonial studies has been to show that alternative understandings of modernity—alternative modernities—are possible.”Footnote 99 The Gothic has often already been read in such terms. Having emerged in the context of movements that tended “to counter the domination of classical and/or realist canons of taste”—namely, antiquarianism, the sentimental novel, ‘graveyard’ poetry, and the philosophy of the sublime as revived by Edmund Burke (1729–1797)—it has become paradigmatic as “the ‘Other’ of classical realism.”Footnote 100 As a literary genre or mode, it mobilizes the irrational, the supernatural, and the paranormal, themes and tropes that also contravene, exceed, or belong to one side of those that are standard to the discourse of modernity. Although represented accordingly as the “repressed double” of that discourse,Footnote 101 the Gothic has also been figured as a double that represses, unleashed as occasion demands in order to purge the fears and destroy the enemies of modernity. For critics who are interested in foregrounding elements that tend to be marginalized under the regimes of both realism and modernity, the Gothic is representative of “a literature […] of the ‘Other,’”Footnote 102 insofar as it is concerned with either reaching accommodation with it or “repelling it, expelling it, and destroying it.”Footnote 103
Irish Gothic has been described as “a narratologically produced demand for a stake to be driven in the heart of all that confounds the project of modernity.”Footnote 104 The Crew of (En)Light(enment)Footnote 105 who strive to save Lucy Westenra (Light of the West)Footnote 106 personify all that British modernity represents: the successful integration of aristocracy (Lord Godalming), bourgeoisie (Mina Harker), law and order (Jonathan Harker), scientific progress (Dr. Seward), and imperial expansion (Quincey Morris). As noted previously, Count Dracula “must be staked […] so too, the version of Ireland as atavistic must be banished.”Footnote 107 To this end, his adversaries assemble and combine all of the modern means at their disposal, which are both discursive—pursuant to their professional fields—and technological—from typewriters through blood transfusion to Winchester repeating-rifles. Although the vampire is driven by them to its point of origin, the narrative ends not with its death but with the birth of a hybridized child. If Dracula already exemplifies the paradoxical status of the Gothic as a double of the discourse of modernity, its revision through postcolonial critical intervention can only further complicate that status. According to the logic of self-alterity identified by Valente, in particular, the vindication of modernity carried out by the novel is displaced by a more moderate and counter-modernist estimation.
To borrow a phrase from Simon Gikandi reiterated by D’haen, what can be seen to be developed in the narrative of Dracula is “a discourse of alterity which is predicated on a deliberate act of self-displacement from the hegemonic culture and its central tenets.”Footnote 108 Enabled by its metrocolonial condition, this movement from the center to the margins of modernity is performed at the beginning of the novel through the figure of Jonathan Harker, whose descent from the metropolis of London into the recesses of Ireland/Transylvania exposes the deleterious colonial conditions of the “other” constituency of the modern United Kingdom. The legitimacy of British hegemony is revealed to have a discursive, as opposed to essential, basis as the Count presents his collection of English maps and manuals, which, even as the solicitor’s journal falters in the face of his discoveries, are soon to be redeployed as the instruments of a retributive reverse colonization. Although, revised in such terms, the postcolonial Dracula remains generally supportive of the project of modernity, it nonetheless expresses profound modernist doubt, which, as much as it counters the certainty that operates on the level of the popular novel, supplements that of canonical modernist texts—such as Heart of Darkness (1899) by Joseph Conrad—that are contemporary with it.
This counter-modernist Dracula slips easily into a neighboring domain of counter-postmodernism. In an early consideration of the overlap between postcolonialism and postmodernism in contemporary literature,Footnote 109 Linda Hutcheon identified thematic concerns that pertain to history and marginality, formal issues that relate to magic realism, and discursive strategies that deploy the tropes of parody, allegory, and ironic defamiliarization. All of these characteristics certainly chime with the doubled-over fantasy of the Gothic novel. It is tempting to read as intertextual parody the literal (re)vamping of the Anglo-Irish landlord who is so central a feature in the Big House fiction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and Valente highlights what he regards to be a consistent strategy of “ironic oscillation,” which is deployed throughout the narrative of the novel.Footnote 110 The relentless “hysterical heroism and heroic hysteria”Footnote 111 exhibited by the protagonists sends up their attempts to contain the machinations of the Count through disparate and disintegrating legal and scientific discourses. If the Crew of (En)Light(enment) do eventually achieve consensus, it is through the mediation of Van Helsing, a “seemingly arbitrary”Footnote 112 and linguistically challenged foreigner, who manages to realize the ultimate triumph of modernity, rather ironically, by means of ritualistic practices that combine rites of Roman Catholicism with folkloric superstition.
As noted by Hutcheon, postcolonialism might use irony but, unlike mainstream currents of postmodernism, it cannot stop there.Footnote 113 Although it is deeply involved in “deconstructing existing orthodoxies,”Footnote 114 postcolonialism is also a “constructive political enterprise” that works to affirm identities and subjectivities that have been alienated by historical processes.Footnote 115 In keeping with this agenda, the postcolonial Dracula counters its own already postmodernist counter-modernism. If the Count must be staked so that colonial Ireland must die, it is in order that a postcolonial Ireland might be released and allowed to flourish. In line with Valente’s rejection of the novel’s alleged “Anglo-supremacy,”Footnote 116 the “Other” of Ireland’s colonial condition—Roman Catholicism—is revalorized in the act of slaying the vampire, a ritual that is performed by a band of representatives of British imperialist modernity who are reformed in the process and whose “bundle of names” will be received by a hybridized child.Footnote 117 The denouement is ultimately one of closure, resolution, and reconciliation when, with “a look of peace, such as [they] never could have imagined might have rested there,”Footnote 118 the “monstrous Other” is reconfigured as a human being. With his colonial condition destroyed and his postcolonial redemption guaranteed, Count Dracula can afford to die with a smile on his face.
Conclusion
Although Ireland has not always qualified for the “postcolonial” epithet and controversies persist in regard to its position in postcolonial studies, even a cursory review of criticism indicates that postcolonialism was deeply involved in Irish studies from the moment of its inception in the 1980s. Attempts to conform such criticism to mainstream foundational discourses—specifically, to a false distinction between creative writing back and academic rereading—are as unfounded as they are unnecessary. Developments at the time were more complex than any such accommodation would imply and rather compare with the more nuanced and variegated brand of postcolonialism that is to be found in contemporary discourse. In that early Irish criticism anticipated many of the current debates in postcolonial theory, it might be argued that it was in advance of the highly influential but nonetheless limited perspective of Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin. On the basis of work conducted in Irish studies in the 1980s and 1990s, it can be concluded that the history and literature of Ireland are not of occasional but of consistent interest. Moreover, their singularity confirms the suggestion by Huggan that postcolonial studies “amounts to the sum of its own internal differences” and that postcolonialism, like the multiple varieties of colonialism it seeks to contest, is “volatile and fractured, dynamically but also uncontrollably plural.”Footnote 119
As part of the Field Day project, Deane’s urging of Irish critics that they reread/rewrite their politics and literature, not from a traditionally nationalist or conventionally revisionist perspective but in response to the (post)colonial situation of the country, anticipates contemporary attempts to reconfigure postcolonialism as a form of critical revisionism. Whereas Huggan makes a point of dissociating historical revisionism from its literary counterpart, critical rereading, Deane explains that his aim is precisely to apply to the interpenetrating fields of culture and politics a novel form of analysis on the basis of which the effects of colonialism might begin to be reversed. Demonstrating that postcolonial historical and literary revisionism need not be mutually exclusive, his brand of revisionism, like that advocated by Huggan more than two decades later, is already an act of intervention and a process of reclamation; more comprehensively, it is one that recuperates both the literary and the political legacies of the past. Exemplified by the Field Day Anthology, which undertook to repossess the revolutionary force of writers and their works in order to enable new writing and new politics in the present, it resonates with the claim made by Huggan that postcolonial revisionism “reinvigorates the spirit of anti-colonial resistance—the revolutionary spirit, if you will—while simultaneously recognizing the need to modify the vocabularies that surround it.”Footnote 120
An example of such revisionism is the repossession of Irish Gothic writing, which, in turn, provided a context for various rereadings of Dracula from a specifically “Irish” perspective in the 1990s and early 2000s. The most widely disseminated revisions include refigurations of the eponymous Count as an Anglo-Irish landlord in Ireland/Transylvania and a Gaelic-Irish immigrant in England. Their incompatibility—whether mutual or with various other such versions of the character—is arguably resolved by Valente’s contention that the Irishness of the Count ought to be determined in terms of the metrocolonial conditions of the novel’s production. A “synthesis of psychobiographical and cultural studies approaches,” Valente’s method focuses not on how the cultural context shaped the novel but on how the novel itself “resists and reworks that cultural context.”Footnote 121 Rather than rewriting Dracula as a reflection of its colonial situation from a postcolonial position, he writes such a position into the text itself, as a “peculiarly situated and motivated response.”Footnote 122 Although Valente probably overestimates authorial intention, he does support his contentions with analyses of other works by Stoker and, in addressing the issue of his subject position, does argue persuasively. More than a rewriting or writing-out of the novel, therefore, the critic’s version might be considered a cowriting, in which case he is less liable to accusations of ideological motivation.
Valente’s revision of Dracula is of particular relevance to Huggan’s introduction of the third term of reconciliation, already implicit in Deane’s aim to foster “a new discourse for a new relationship” between the divided communities of Ireland and Great Britain.Footnote 123 According to a logic of self-alterity, the revision of the novel not only supports an anticolonial critique but advocates the unity through diversity that a postcolonial and truly unionist resolution of the metrocolonial condition—in a sense wholly other than that of sectarian political unionism—might have achieved. It could be argued that the hybridization of the Harker child is simply another imperialist narrative, which assimilates anticolonial resistance in the form of “a re-indigenization of national belonging.”Footnote 124 As a form of accommodation between formerly antagonistic individuals or communities, however, reconciliation depends on “the preparedness of people to anticipate a shared future”Footnote 125 and, if revolution-oriented postcolonialism insists on an embattled position, its reconciliation-oriented equivalent “stresses a negotiated path.”Footnote 126 That these orientations are not mutually exclusive is evident in Valente’s rereading of Dracula, which demonstrates a type of revisionism that recuperates the revolutionary without rejecting its reconciliatory alternative and lends support to the contention by Huggan “that both reconciliation and revolution are central to current understandings of the postcolonial field.”Footnote 127
While highlighting the need to avoid reductive, inflexible, and universal definitions, the metrocolonial concept is also of undoubted value in specifying the status of Ireland within the discourse of postcolonialism, arguably resolving the issue of whether the country—otherwise neither colony nor metropole—should be considered at all. In regard to its wider application, it is clearly of relevance to all of the Anglo-Irish authors of Killeen’s Gothic tradition and might be applied more generally to reassess, for example, the influence of Yeats on postcolonial literature or to reframe historical revisionism in such fictions as Roddy Doyle’s A Star Called Henry (1999) and Jamie O’Neill’s At Swim, Two Boys (2001). Its interdisciplinary potential is demonstrated in Valente’s most recent monograph, The Myth of Manliness in Irish National Culture, 1880–1922 (2011). Although Dracula is not mentioned in this context, Valente’s consideration of “mixed gender associations”Footnote 128 in his earlier work already indicates that the concept lends itself to an intersectional analysis of class, race, gender, sexuality, and other social categories and thereby as a means of connecting postcolonial with alternative readings of the novel—discursive, psychoanalytic, and socio-historical—and further containing its critical plurality. Finally, the metrocolonial concept might be extended beyond Irish studies to address aspects of other postcolonial cultures and societies; writers such as Rudyard Kipling and Doris Lessing come immediately to mind.
In view of the self-appointed task of postcolonialism “to seek energetically to intervene in the unfinished history of the modern world,”Footnote 129 the final section of this article considered how critical revisions of Dracula might be situated in the contexts of (post)modernism and (post)modernity. Although McCormack warns against the recruitment of Stoker to an “Anglo-Irish modernist canon,” he does contend that, “[h]owever loosely, Dracula attaches itself to aspects of high modernism.”Footnote 130 In less guarded terms, Valente sees it as “consciously adopting the kind of sophisticated, post-impressionistic strategies of representation that have signaled, for generations of readers, the aesthetically serious complexity of early modernist artists.”Footnote 131 If given to being revised in such unexpected terms, the novel also lends itself to revisionism in the direction of postmodernism. Systemically multilayered and thoroughly fragmented, it relentlessly recycles earlier fictions and proconnects with alternative versions in newer media and with the kindred and ever-proliferating “semi-demons” of twentieth-century popular culture.Footnote 132 In turn, as much as it might exemplify certain characteristics of both modernism and postmodernism when revised within the framework of postcolonialism, Dracula affiliates with counter-discourses that cause the disruption of such paradigms. Evidently, Bram Stoker’s masterpiece promises to reward its readers with copious opportunities for revisionary rereading/rewriting; like the rapacious revenant he had the temerity to release, it just keeps coming back for more.
