The Land of Unlikeness

Well I’m sure glad that Dan keeps himself on the theology, thus justifying this as a theology blog, cause I would like to write about Dracula tonight. I just finished Bram Stoker’s wonderful (and big) book, and then watched the Coppola film version of it. The movie is so-so (who the hell did Keanu Reeves sleep with to get these roles???); the big change Coppola makes is to throw in a love story between Count Dracula and his youthful love (way back in 1460 something). Due to Turkish treachery she commits suicide, the church (Romanian Orthodox I think?) shouts blasphemy, her soul is to rot in hell, and Dracula commits himself to evil. A little cheezy, but it actually pays off in the end, for Coppola then has the 19thc. Dracula fall in love with the British Mina, who is basically a reincarnation of his ancient Romanian darling. At the end Mina redeems the Count and sends his soul to heaven, which, though the the love story is not in the book, is pretty true to Bram’s plot, in which Mina emphasizes the save-ability of the vampires (of course they are saved by having their hearts run through with a stake and their heads chopped off!). This is, of course, the Faust myth, and a surprisingly reliable duplication of it. For even though Faust sells his soul to the devil, and messes pretty seriously with some good German souls, at the end he still gets into Paradise, due to Mephistopheles getting distracted by a cute boy angel (!!no kidding!!). I’m sure people have written scads on this topic, but what is probably less noticed is how close Harry Potter fits into (and I would argue, nicely completes) the Faust myth. Especially as concerning Dracula, in which Rowling borrows the device of the good guy and the bad guy having a telepathic communication (Mina and Dracula, Harry and Voldemort). Mina also wears a scar on her forehead where she is burned by the host, due to her burgeoning vampire blood, which cannot bear the sacrament. There are many other parallels as well, but the main theme, I believe, is the importance of redeeming the devil figure. Whether it is Milton’s Satan, Goethe’s Faust, (hell, even the damned in Dante), Frankenstein, Dracula, or Voldemort (and Snape too), it is the possible redemption of these devilish figures which really lights up these texts. I think Rowling does a great job of addressing this in her final book with the wailing baby figure which shows up in the sequence in King’s Cross station, clearly at least part of Voldemort’s soul. This is perhaps her most poetic moment. . . . In all these literary creations death and life are maddeningly enmeshed but what separates them can become razor sharp as well. There is a big difference between a dying life (that maintains itself in love as it struggles with death, as Jacob with the Angel {of death?}) and a living death, the undead, nosferatu, which, in a mockery of life takes blood to perpetuate its unliving undying death. All these Faust myths have a bit of that Germanic moral tone as well, in that we must, as Christians, look very carefully at what it means to be granted immortal life. Does it mean we have power over death, power to never die, power to rule nature and disease? Or is it perhaps the gift to die in the name of love, which is what God means by life, but we misunderstand him sometimes. . . .