Dracula's Guest And Other Weird Tales Read Online Free PDF Page B

meaning. In seeking to put human nature back in touch with the forces of the imaginative unconscious, it also sought inspiration from the non-rational forces of myth, madness and dreams. In 1924 André Breton’s First Surrealist Manifesto contended that, ‘If the depths of our minds conceal strange forces capable of augmenting or conquering those on the surface, it is in our greatest interest to capture them.’ 29 Undermining nineteenth-century naturalism, Surrealism however did not try to transcend realism; rather it sought to dissolve the foundations of stability upon which realism depended and, in the process, to question the basis upon which it claimed to be able to represent reality. In short, Surrealism refused to recognize the existence of a divide between ‘real’ and ‘unreal’.
    Abandoning the critical mind to its imaginative faculty, the Surrealists’ practice of ‘automatic’ writing was predicated on the suppression of rational consciousness. For the Surrealists, to write with no predetermined thought as quickly as one could on a blank sheet of paper revealed the infinite powers of imagination, the total surrender of oneself to the impulse of chance illuminating the depths of human consciousness and capturing the immediacy of thought. This quest for a reality beyond logic characterized much of Stoker’s writing. Its relevance, however, is particularly apposite to
The Lair of the White Worm
, which, composed in a mere three months, displays the emotional excesses and subversion of logic which were the hallmarks of Surrealism. Demonstrating his own avowal that ‘No one has the power to stop the workings of imagination’, 30 and emancipating imagination itself from the formal world of logic, Stoker’sMercia amalgamates dreams, hypnosis, madness and hallucinations with the recognized conventions of social propriety. The novel’s hasty production may in turn be seen as a precursor to the ‘automatism’ of the Surrealists, the baggy narrative and disjointed chronology merely by-products of a far more interesting experimentation in the art of subconscious creativity. Inhabiting a borderland where distinctions between what has tangible reality and what is imaginary are unclear, Stoker’s final novel encapsulates André Breton’s summation of Surrealism’s goal:
    … there exists a certain point in the mind at which life and death, real and imaginary, past and future, communicable and incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived in terms of contradiction. 31
    Rejecting any sense of human identity as serious, stable or continuous,
The Lair of the White Worm
is therefore both reflective and progressive in its outlook. Blurring apparent differences between reality and imagination whilst simultaneously acknowledging an adherence to late-nineteenth-century social conventions, the novel is an intriguing amalgamation of avant-garde vision and traditionalist sentiment.
    This keen awareness of the artistic atmosphere in which he was writing may well have been a natural consequence of working in theatreland. There, Stoker met a large number of fellow artists, from Mark Twain to W. B. Yeats, Ford Maddox Ford to Walt Whitman. Of all the literary figures with whom Stoker came into contact at the Lyceum, however, he respected none more than the Poet Laureate, Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809– 92), whom he met in March 1879 and whose plays
The Cup
and
Becket
were produced by the Lyceum Company in January 1881 and February 1893 respectively. Stoker’s admiration for Tennyson reveals itself in
The Lair of the White Worm
, where allusion is made to the poet’s
In Memoriam
(1850), Sir Nathaniel’s observation that ‘We are going back to the origin of superstition – to the age when dragons of the prime tore each other in their slime’ ( Chapter XXIV ) being a close citation of:
    No more? A monster then, a dream,
    A discord. Dragons of the prime,
    That tare each other in their slime,
    Were mellow music matched