In general, I think it’s cool that Dracula Daily has gotten more people interested in Dracula by Bram Stoker. However, as Dracula Daily season begins again, I’d like to talk about something that I would hope has been discussed elsewhere, just that I haven’t happened to see it.
Basically, it’s this: Dracula Daily is not the same as reading Dracula. It’s an adaptation, like a film or graphic novel or play based on Dracula would be.
Sending the portions of the novel to readers based on their dates in Dracula when they do not appear in that order in Dracula is a meaningful adaptational change. Dracula, as a novel, exists with its words in a certain order, which is not the order in which Dracula Daily presents them.
Recently there has been a post going around showcasing a project in which someone created a book titled Gatsby Great The with the premise that all the words in The Great Gatsby are there, but listed in alphabetical order. Looking through Gatsby Great The is obviously a very different experience than reading The Great Gatsby.
The film Memento (2000) does not present its events in chronological order, but there are film edits out there that do show all scenes in chronological order. Watching a strictly chronological edit of Memento is not the same as watching Memento.
What I’m trying to get at here is that the decisions Stoker made to present events in the order he did in Dracula were decisions made with purposeful intent, and are therefore an important part of Dracula as a novel. Dracula Daily, an adaptation, does not replicate these decisions, and this makes it different from Dracula. The mood sustained in the reader is going to be different based on what the reader knows and when the reader finds it out. The effect of the story on the reader is going to be different with deliberate pauses in the story based on dates in the story rather than the reader’s own reading pace.
Of course, no author, living or dead, can force readers to read their book in any particular way. Once a reader has a book in hand, they can read it backwards, read pages in the order presented by a random number generator, read only every other page, or do any number of other things. But if someone told you they read a book page by page in a random order, maybe by the end they would understand the story, but maybe you would think that they’d missed out on the reading experience in an important way.
Dracula Daily offers the text of Dracula in chronological order, so it’s not quite the same as this random-page reading hypothetical. However, it is not a neutral presentation of Dracula. Reordering, like any adaptation, includes losses. The best adaptations also include gains, and perhaps Dracula Daily is one of these. For all Dracula Daily readers, I hope so.
But I would also like to say that if news of Dracula Daily has made anyone remember that they’d like to finally get around to reading Dracula...try reading Dracula first, before doing Dracula Daily. It’s pretty easy to get.
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