Two Evening Lands:

James Joyce takes a bite

out of Bram Stoker

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 a Great War and a Great Horror Novel about the Great Hunger.  Sure, and 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 in the allegorical indie docufiction novel Ulysses [1922] began right from the beginning of Ulysses.  For the sight and sound of Malachi “Buck” Mulligan emerging from the depths to the parapet of the 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 “Bram” Stoker.

The fact that one of the protagonists of Ulysses, Mister Leopold “Poldy” Bloom, sympathizing with his wife’s philandering and, not wanting to disturb her afternoon tryst with the ginger haired implicitly Stoker linked and equally ginger haired Hugh “Blazes” Boylan, wandered lugubriously around Dublin in a 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, Marion “Molly” Bloom, 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 her 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.  All of which got me wandering around my apartment

Bibliography

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

Stoker, Bram.  Dracula.  USA: Prospero Classics Library, 20??.