The Historian

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2005

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Preface-Part 1, Chapter 12

Part 1, Chapters 13-24

Part 2, Chapters 25-36

Part 2, Chapters 37-48

Part 3, Chapters 49-65

Part 3, Chapter 66-Epilogue

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

Dracula: From Impaler to Immortal

While Dracula appears in the novel as a character, he most often functions as a symbol of horror: As Vlad Ţepeş, he commits actions that are terrifying and inhumane, thus the nickname Vlad the Impaler. As Dracula, he represents the horror of defying all that is natural and good. Not only does he live on after death but he also insinuates himself into history, orchestrating and cataloguing evil events throughout the centuries. His capacity to invoke horror, ironically, also contributes to the source of his mysterious appeal. Horror is a reaction always tinged with titillation and surprise. Paul uses the phrase “a thrill of horror” (46) to describe his first encounter with Dracula, though he is barely aware of the vampire’s presence at the time. Throughout the novel, Paul and other characters are variously repulsed and enthralled by the prince’s dark powers.

Dracula himself comes into focus more clearly in Bora’s study, where his “face was everywhere” (247), the predatory gaze both penetrating and mesmerizing. His physical appearance is fitting of a man who once impaled his enemies on stakes and a vampire who employs evil to extend his life.

Dracula thinks of himself, however, as “a scholar at heart,” and his interest in history, though it runs to the barbarous, is genuine (607). While Dracula’s desire to preserve his own history while influencing other histories displays a monstrous evil, it creates play with the traditional interpretations of Dracula’s motivations: His legacy is not primarily his ability to cheat death; rather, it is his library, a compilation of his deeds and misdeeds, of his influence on and dominion over the last 500 years of history. The author implicitly acknowledges that Dracula is, in this way, undead; his legend will live on forever between the covers of all these books—including her own. Immortality can be achieved through literature, as Dracula himself has proved.

The Power of Books and Words

Concomitant to Dracula’s immortality are the books that represent him, in particular the antiquated book containing the woodcut of the dragon. While this strange book holds no words, it functions as a kind of calling card for the vampire. He leaves it with scholars—historians—who he deems potentially worthy of his employ. The name “Dracula” is etymologically linked to dragon and seems a fitting symbol for such a ferocious legend. The dragon book also seems to contain his essence. When Paul opens it, it carries the scent “of pages time had long since begun to defile” (220), or of “an evil drug I didn’t want to inhale” (221). It is as if Dracula himself is entombed within the book, and his lingering scent is an intoxicant that draws historians to him, despite their trepidations. Rossi remarks of the book that it “seemed alive in my hands, yet it smelled of death” (88), an apt description of the undead vampire whose legend it conveys.

The mysterious book with its ferocious dragon woodcut, too, travels through history, just as Bram Stoker’s Dracula courses through the novel, its totemic power undeniable. While the antiquated dragon book is a tabula rasa—its pages “completely blank” (12), ready to be inscribed with meaning—Stoker’s novel is a fount of information, though the narrator cannot decide whether true or mythical. The narrator’s confusion between what might be fact and what might be fiction compares to her father’s struggle with what to believe regarding Rossi’s revelations: “[H]ow could I not believe my adviser on any point related to his own scholarship? Wouldn’t that call into question all the work we had done together?” (45). A historian, he implies, would not fabricate the truth—which renders the title of the novel itself, with its “authentic” account of the living legend of Dracula, ironic.

The power of words is another motif that runs throughout the novel. The phrase above Dracula’s tomb in the maps—“Reader, unbury him with a word” (29)—is repeated throughout the novel in various incarnations (111, 222, 350). Here, words—in the form of scholarship and research—have the power to uncover Dracula’s final resting place. In addition, the incantation is addressed directly to the reader, which refers both to the characters reading the inscription in the novel and to the audience reading The Historian itself. Thus, the reader is implicated in the phrase: By reading this book, the reader unburies the undead. The word is the method by which his spell is spread. Notably, when the monks transport Dracula’s body from Constantinople to Bulgaria, the word used to describe this transfer is “translation” (500). The legend travels with but a word.

A Plague of History

The motif of plague and contamination, warfare and atrocity, trouble and terror follow wherever Dracula goes. It is likely no accident that the narrator’s travels to Greece coincide with the military coup that occurs later that year, in 1974. Dracula is following her, and strife always follows him. Paul compares him to Stalin, “loyal to no one but himself, as quick to execute his own followers as he was to kill his Turkish enemies” (296). Dracula credits his own actions for the most violent and demoralizing moments of the 20th century.

In addition, the scholarship clearly shows that Vlad Ţepeş was skilled at germ warfare, as Hugh tells Paul, so the comparisons of vampirism to plague are apt. A year after Dracula’s supposed death, the “Little Plague,” as it was called, broke out in Istanbul (441). Helen expresses legitimate fears as to what could transpire should people like Stalin or Hitler gain access to Dracula’s powers of immortality: “They did not need to live five hundred years to accomplish these horrors” (534). Dracula is both an antecedent for such horrors and an instigator of them; his library, too, functions as a symbol of how evil is passed down in the world. Thus, not only is vampirism itself a disease that pollutes the body and corrupts the soul, but it is also symbolic of the moral decay that has been passed down through history.