Two Evening Lands:

replying to

the allegorical Bram Stoker indie docufiction novel

Dracula

in the allegorical James Joyce indie docufiction novel

Ulysses

or,

jesting joker James bites Bram back

Where?

To evening lands.

Evening will find itself.

- Stephen Dedalus [Joyce, 63]

By Gary W. Wright

and wondering again how I would write such an essay about a Great Book created to take on and heal a world devastated by a Great War, with allusions to the equally healing and allegorical Homer epic poem The Odyssey which followed the equally devasting and allegorical Homer epic poem The Iliad to affirm that implicit intention on one level, and, on another level, also created to take on and take out a Great Horror Novel about the Great Hunger.  And sure if the implications that James Joyce was taking on the allegorical and implicitly Great Hunger exorcising Bram Stoker indie docufiction novel Dracula [1897] on one level didn't begin right from the beginning of the allegorical indie docufiction novel Ulysses [1922].  For the sight and sound of Malachi “Buck” Mulligan, the first of many nicknames of characters in the novel to remind us of Abraham “Bram” Stoker, emerging from the depths to the parapet of a Martello Tower with a razor and a bowl of hot water to shave reminded us that Jonathan Harker also settled down with a bowl of hot water and a razor to shave with the help of a mirror on the wall of his room on his first morning in his room in a tower at Castle Dracula in Transylvania.  An ordinary shave that turned extraordinary after he cut his neck with the razor and the old and intimidating Count Dracula appeared out of nowhere to eagerly lick the blood off his neck to the shock of Harker, a shock increased by the fact that the reflection of Dracula could not be seen in the mirror.  A lack of reflection that has since the publication of Dracula been always interpreted as meaning that the lack of reflections in mirrors is one of the characteristics of vampires, rather than that Dracula was the Dark Side of Harker that existed only in his mind, and therefore could not be seen.  A Dark Side that also implicitly symbolized the Dark Side of Stoker, given that the name of Jonathan Harker was so similar to the full name of Abraham Stoker.

Fittingly, Mulligan soon left the tower to go swimming with his good friend Stephen Dedalus and their newfound Sassenach tourist friend “Heinous” Haines, where the three young men discovered that boats were searching Dublin Bay for a drowned man.  For the drowned man caused the grim and dark spectre of death to intrude on their sunny day and happy swim, evoking the grim and dark spectre of Count Dracula that haunted Dracula.  A grim, dark, and deadly spectre that grew closer when young Dedalus agreed to drop off a letter about about foot and mouth disease in cattle to a Dublin newspaper for his employer and children’s school headmaster Mr. Deasy.  For the “mission” reminded us that young Harker agreed to travel to Transylvania on behalf of his London real estate firm to finalize the purchase of a London property by Count Dracula, implicitly linking Dedalus to Harker as well as Telemachus.

Making it fitting that soon after Teledalus exited stage right, the implicitly Odysseus linked Mister Leopold “Poldy” Bloom entered from stage left, doing his best not to disturb his still sleeping wife Maid Marion “Molly” Bloom as he put on a black suit for the funeral of his friend Patrick “Paddy” Dignam later that morning.  A funeral in an old graveyard in the morning daylight that evoked Count Dracula’s fondness or sleeping during the daylight hours in coffins.  A funeral that led to Bloom sympathizing with his wife’s philandering and, not wanting to disturb her afternoon tryst with the implicitly Stoker linked and ginger haired Hugh “Blazes” Boylan, his ginger hair evoking that of Stoker to implicitly affirm the link of Stoker to Boylan, later wandering lugubriously around Dublin still wearing that mourning black funeral suit that made him appear to all baffled observers as the living embodiment of death, implicitly affirmed his link to the nonliving embodiment of death, Count Dracula, as he wandered around London in Dracula, and also implicitly affirmed that Joyce was indeed using Ulysses to roast Dracula on one level.  An implicit link reaffirmed by the fact that Bloom, like  Dracula, was a solitary, lonely, and luvlorn outsider from Eastern Europe who longed for the return of the luv of his sad wife Molly, like Dracula longed for the return of the luv of his dead wife, Elsbeta, a lack of luvin’ and sex from Molly for ten years do to her being despondent about the stillborn death of their son Rudy that had led Poldy to satisfy his sexual desires with anguished masturbation and embarrassing trysts with Dublin prostitutes. 

An implicit link again affirmed when Bloom stood outside Daly’s pub looking hungrily at its two beautiful young barmaid sirens but not entering the pub until invited in by his friend Richard “Richie” Goulding, reminding us that Dracula was also forced to wait outside houses looking hungrily in at his victims until also unwittingly invited inside by them, victims who were also usually beautiful young women like the brunette Wilhelmina “Mina” Harker and the redheaded Lucy Westenra who implicitly returned in the forms of barmaids Wilhelmina “Mina” Kennedy aka “Gold” and Lydia Douce aka “Bronze”.  Thus it was fitting that an air from an Italian opera called Sonnambula was raved about by Goulding to Bloom during his music and song filled stay in Daly’s pub.  For Sonnambula reminded us that Dracula spoke to Westenra in her dreams and persuaded her to sleepwalk to her window and open it so that he could slowly drink the beautiful young red head’s sweet virginal blood night after night, slowly draining her of her life Force and causing her to slowly waste away growing thinner and thinner as if she was starving to death in a famine to implicitly affirm that Dracula was the undead symbolic embodiment of the Great Hunger, and to make it fitting that Lucy’s name was almost an acronym comprised of the first letters of Ireland’s four provinces, Leinster, Ulster, Connaught, and Munster. 

An implicit Stoker addressing intent that continued after Bloom left Daly’s and wandered into Barney Kiernan’s pub.  For a citizen sippin’ in the pub by the name of Giltrap had a huge, nasty, and beastly dog named Garryowen that eventually chased Bloom out of his pub and down the street, a bad tempered dog that evoked the equally huge, nasty, and beastly black dog that leapt out of the corpse strewn and ragged sailed coffin filled ship, a coffin ship that evoked the sailing ships filled with Irish corpses that brought Irish citizens fleeing the Great Famine to North America, that brought Count Dracula to England and slammed into the southern coast of the island nation at the head of a huge, howling, and lightning filled storm of the century.  An implicit Dracula addressing intent that also continued in the next segment, which found Bloom hiding at Sandymount beach where he had fled the demon dog and standing in the gathering twilight staring with his usual tragicomic and vampiric intensity at a pretty young maid named Gerty MacDowell, who ironically but fittingly was the teenaged granddaughter of “grandpapa” Giltrap, owner of the “…lovely dog Garryowen that almost talked, it was so human” [Joyce 458]. 

For as Count Bloomula stared wistfully, “…a bat flew forth from the ivied belfry [of a nearby church] through the dusk, hither, thither, with a tiny lost cry” [Joyce 473].  A small bat later fittingly noticed by Bloom itself after his voyeuristic encounter with flirty Gerty, a wistful flirtation from afar “…that was their secret, only theirs, alone in the hiding twilight and there was none to know or tell save the little bat that flew so softly through the evening to and fro and little bats don’t tell” [Joyce 478].  A small and solitary bat so completely lacking in ominous menace that even Count Bloomula, when he noticed it again later, thought “…no harm in him” [Joyce 498].  An ironic thought, indeed, given that Stoker insisted in Dracula that some bats transformed into the vampire Dracula and that in the next segment, set in the National Maternity Hospital in Dublin pondering the overlong birth labours of one Mina Harker evoking Mrs. Mina Purefoy, a drunk Dedalus waxed exuberant about theories people had used to explain pregnancy over the centuries and spoke “…of bigness wrought by wind of seeds of brightness or by potency of vampires mouth to mouth or, as Virgilius saith, by the influence of the occident or by the reek of moonflower” [Joyce 509].  All of which got me wandering around my wee apartment

Bibliography

Joyce, James.  Ulysses.  London: The Bodley Head, 1967.

Stoker, Bram.  Dracula.  London: Collins, 2021.