Plot and the Emotions

A short follow-up to yesterday's thoughts on Dracula. Are you caught-up in the story yet? What is the "hook" that pulls us into the story and makes us want to learn more? Carroll's "erotetic" (question and answer) understanding of plot maintains that questions are posed early in the novel that we expect to be answered later on. In horror stories, the question at the heart of the narrative is often "is the supernatural being or event proposed by the story going to turn out to be real?". Such stories can be thought of as dramatizations of a conflict between a "supernatural" and a "naturalistic" interpretation of the story. If the narrative leaves us suspended between the two, the genre is called, following Tzveton Todorov, "the fantastic." An example would be The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, in which we cannot be quite sure whether there was an actual haunting/possession taking place or simply the imaginings of an unhinged mind. In "pure" horror tales, the monster ends up being real. Todorov calls that type of story the "fantastic-marvelous", and the type in which the purported supernatural event or being is explained naturalistically the "fantastic-uncanny." The "fantastic" itself offers no resolution at all. Do you think that it would be possible to interpret Dracula as an instance of the fantastic? That is, is there any evidence that Count Dracula was in fact not a vampire? Compare the narrative structure of Dracula with Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskerville's, a Sherlock Holmes story in which an allegedly supernatural being (a spectral dog) ends up being explained by Holmes as a murderer's plot. By the way, Doyle and Stoker knew one another, and there is a Holmes story that seems to have been based on Dracula ("The Illustrious Client"). We may look in on Holmes and his faithful companion Dr. Watson while in London.