No Clocks in His Castle: The Threat of the Durée in Bram Stoker's "Dracula"

Bergson’s difficulty in persuading the academy of the merits of subjective, internally experienced time over Einstein’s positively quantifiable, externally measured time provides insight into the suspicion with which the vampire hunters of Stoker’s novel regard Dracula’s supernatural aspect: there was an overwhelming desire in this period to discredit metaphysical interpretations of the world, interpretations which had only recently been surpassed. The novel was written in the wake of the 1884 International Meridian Conference, at which global spatiotemporal standardization was imposed through the ratification of the Greenwich Prime Meridian as longitude zero (making official the maritime practice of measuring time by longitudinal distance from the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England). The first section of this paper discusses how the vampire hunters of Stoker’s novel reflect an emergent positivism that rejects the authority of human experience in favour of scientific measurement, while simultaneously acknowledging the threat to the supremacy of science posed by subjective modes of experience. Harker’s criticism recalls one of the main historical reasons for the 1884 International Meridian Conference: to resolve the apparent confusion and danger of train travel under a system in which “each railway operated independently on the local time of some principal point or points on said road, [a] plan [which] was found to be highly objectionable, owing to the fact that some fifty standards, intersecting and interlacing each other, were in use throughout the country” (Annual Report 20).