Van Helsing Really Said Hey Remember Your Love That Died In My Care? Yeah, Do You Mind If I Cut Her Head

van helsing really said “hey remember your love that died in my care? yeah, do you mind if i cut her head off?”

Van Helsing: "Tell your friend everything, it's a matter of life and death."

Seward: "Okay."

Days later

Van Helsing: "Have you told your friend everything?"

Seward: "No, I was waiting for your permission."

Van Helsing: "Good. Never tell him anything."

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Take then good note of it. Nothing is too small. I counsel you, put down in record even your doubts and surmises.

Here it is. This is the thing about Dracula that makes me lose my mind. This is why the book is the shape it is.

I keep talking about office skills and bureaucracy and the mundane because I can't believe so much hinges on it. Van Helsing, legendary monster-hunter of popular culture, tells Jack that they can fix this as long as he takes careful, thorough notes.

Medical records, phonograph cylinders, stenography. This, Van Helsing says, is how you kill a monster. This is how modernity and rationalism can win against the occult. It's so ridiculously middle-class and mild-mannered.

Part of me is really taken with it; my job title has the word documentation in it, so it makes me feel very powerful, and I love the strange contrast of pitting fangs against typewriters.

It's always kind of bothered me though. Organisation and writing things down was not new or unique to late Victorian Britain. Van Helsing's comments on knowledge as "stronger than memory" run counter to the Count's speech to Jonathan where he gave an oral history of his own family and of Transylvania, defining knowledge as what is written. The championing of written records as modern and sophisticated in a battle against an old-fashioned foreign invader who gives oral histories of his own culture reads to me as following a colonial definition of "civilisation" and I'm always sceptical of it.

It's such an important theme of the novel, it defines the form it takes and plays a huge role in the narrative, and can't work out how I feel about it at all.

｡ﾟﾟ･｡･ﾟﾟ｡ ﾟ. September will bring blessings.

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