Dracularity

In a long and complex book, full of possible candidates, Dracularity is the standout word in Gravity’s Rainbow. A coinage of Pynchon’s, as far as I can tell, the word appears once in the novel, as part of one of the most often quoted passages that reads as follows:

“Dialectics, matrices, archetypes, all need to connect, once in a while, back to some of that proletarian blood, to body odors and senseless screaming across the table, to cheating and lost hope, or else all is dusty Dracularity, the West’s ancient curse.”

What is Dracularity? What does it mean for Dracularity to be our curse? Dracularity, in addition to being euphonious, fun to say, and possessing a certain zing, acts as a vivid invocation of vampirism and blood-sucking. The idea seems to be that deep within the “West” is a tendency, sometimes buried, sometimes not, but always present, that drives us to exploitation and evil. Even as the idea of “The West” emerged in the early modern period, out of, but transcending ideas of “Christendom” (to deep to get into here, check out the Graeber essay, “There never was a West” for more on this idea), we can see this tendency emerging. The institution that played a pivotal role in the birth the modern West, the Tran-Atlantic Slave trade, revels how people who were coming into contact with new way to order life, The West, reached for a very similar metaphor as Pynchon does to explain to themselves and others what was going on. Namely, that some Africans, both involved in the slave trade on either side or merely privy to it, believed the European slavers to be cannibals who were purchasing humans to eat. Why else would ship after ship come to their shores demanding Black flesh, willing to pay top price for it, seemingly without end? This sentiment also mirrored a belief that Europeans had all these new cultures and peoples they were meeting around the world, from the Americas to Africa, were savage, cultureless, brutal and cannibalistic. While obviously propaganda to encourage the conquests and cope for those engaged in and/or profiting from the violence this idea is much more widespread than the African version. Think of cartoons of a YT guy in a pith helmet in a big pot, being boiled by some face-painted-bone-in-nose savage. So here we have a number of cultures entwined in this violent dynamic, a dynamic and series of systems that builds the West, with both sides viewing the other as cannibals and/or vampires. There is some understanding, by all parties involved, that this trade, this trade that is foundational to the modern West, has something cannibalistic and evil. They were sensing and trying to name the Dracularity of the situation. Obviously, the African version is more true to life and illustrative of the actual, material dynamics of the slave trade, but the choice of metaphor, that of a cannibal blood-sucker, Dracula type figure, a metaphor created and explored at the beginning of the West’s conquest of and war on the Earth, finds summery in the word Dracularity. 

Besides the blood-sucking/cannibalism, the other thing Dracula calls to mind is wealth and aristocracy. Dracula is a count, he’s a rich land-owner from a pre-capitalist, feudal-era of European history. The vampire itself can be read as a story about how the rich and ruling classes are bloodsuckers. How they live in castles and estates, not working but instead living off of the soil of the serfs and peasants. Mostly unseen but occasionally the locus of extreme violence to keep that unearned, extortionate tribute coming in. This is, partly, what capitalism and the modern world order was supposed to save us from. No more families of rich ghouls with all the power and money. Now these riches were supposed to flow upwards to the clever and creative, who were able to open business and develop markets and hustle their way into success. Capitalism is dynamic and cut-throat, feudalism is stale and stable and moribund. The sort of dynastic wealth and power that Dracula represents is supposed to be impossible. Family wealth that doesn’t innovate and seek out new money-making opportunities will be out competed by hungry young entrepreneurs who will be rewarded by the Free Market. Capitalism's promise is in its dynamism, in the fact that the old rent-seeking wealth of the feudal era would be swept away by ceaseless innovation. But, all of us here live in the real world, Dracula, the sort and type of power he represents, was indeed not defeated by the paradigm shift that was Western Modernity. Quite the opposite, his power grew. There are more Draculas than ever. Bloodsuckers who profit from misery, who live by killing and draining.

There is another sense the word is sometimes used, one less connected to the original Pynchon sense. In this case, we highlight the weird and eerie and occulted (in the sense of unseen) aspects of Dracula. In the novel, Dracula is always accompanied by strange happenings. People on the ship he travelled on die mysteriously. Plague follows him, nightmares, all sorts of spooky unsettling occurrences. This is partially how they figure out he’s supernatural. Likewise, there are events that feel “Dracular” in the sense that something more is going on, something beyond the normal, something connected to a deeper and evil set of powers. And certain events seem to have this quality, this sense that something more and deeper is going on, that we’re only seeing a small part of it, and the whole picture is monstrous. Put simply, it feels like Dracula must be behind it. Lots of big events in our modern world feel like this. They’re strange and horrible, the official story seems laughably tidy and small and the more you learn about and look into it, the more complex and dark and evil it seems. Take 9/11, you pull on any part of the story, where did the hijackers get the money to live and train in the US? Why were warnings ignored, seemingly on purpose? Why did no one in the security apparatus ever get in any trouble at all for what seems like a career-ending fuck-up? Why did the response to this even seem completely “ready to go” even before the smoke cleared? Why did this event end with the most Dracular (and when it comes to Cheney we can add another sense to the word, as an adjective that means “undead”) folks involved getting everything they’d be working on for a decade? Or how about Epstein? Or the JFK assassination? Or, you could go back further, there is something Dracular about WWI. Any event that seems simultaneously important, unsatisfactorily explained and carries with it the hint of a darker evil is Dracular.