About Dracula’s footnotes

Any author or editor will understand the tension that exists between telling the reader what needs to be told, and insulting said reader’s intelligence. And it’s a tension that will likely never be resolved. When my Leonard Cohen books was published, a reviewer on Amazon complained that I blithely chucked around words like “solipsistic” while feeling the need to explain that sake is Japanese rice wine. Which is, amusingly enough, a rather solipsistic argument, because it’s only valid when the critic shares the same grab bag of knowns and unknowns.

In the same vein, while reading the Wordsworth Classics edition of Dracula, I’m quite grateful that the editor, David Rogers, is helpful enough to gloss archaic Whitby dialect (“crammle aboon the grees”) and the minutiae of central European history (Honofoglalas) and at the same time wonder why I’m being told about Thor and Medusa, the Danube, the British Museum and the Battle of Waterloo. I mean, we all know what they are. Don’t we?

Yet another thing that really should have gone into my dissertation, I suppose.