The medium of language, as a material available to speaking beings to shape into communication, is a beautifully imperfect and inaccurate phenomenon.  It can be read and reinvented in as many ways as there are readers, and such an ephemeral legibility is the root of its power to create consciousness, the result of inaugurating “things” and “world” into the reader’s mind.  Such were Martin Heidegger’s terms of understanding the process of forming consciousness, and in his labyrinthine essay “Language” (1950), he articulates a dense network of ideas through repetition, juxtaposition and paradox.  Through a discussion of the act of speaking, the analysis of a poem, and an elaborate chain of wordplay, Heidegger approaches not only an explication of his conception of language, but a demonstration of it.  The experience of the essay “Language” requires a relaxation of the reasoning, delimiting Ego, just as its author imagines language itself to be experienced.

   The study of this experience and its manifestation and integration into human consciousness is the concern of phenomenology, a discipline founded by German philosopher Edmund Husserl.  His 1913 book Ideas: A General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology used the term as the “study of essences,” or the investigation and description of phenomena as consciously experienced.  He invented the “phenomenological reduction,” a process that attempts to reveal the structures of consciousness and the pure contents of the mind without reference to an outside existence.

   While all followers of Husserl attempt to purely describe these contents, they differ as to whether a total reduction can be performed and the actual results of the “pure description.”  Martin Heidegger, a colleague and critic of Husserl, initiated his forays into philosophy on that colleague’s heels but quickly diverged on the task of phenomenology, claiming that it should describe what is hidden in ordinary, everyday experience.  His first book, Sein und Zeit (Being and Time, 1927), was an attempt to articulate the ontology and phenomenology of “everydayness.”  The questions and ideas surrounding and informing such an investigation would be omnipresent in all his following works, to some degree, but a major turn in his career would find the later Heidegger less concerned with matters of “being-in-the-world” and more concerned with language, poetry and the ways they are experienced.  Ontology and phenomenology saturate these experiences, as well as the experience of his lectures and writings, and it is with a fundamental phenomenological slant that Heidegger approaches the question, “What is language?”

  Heidegger’s 1950 contemplation of language’s potential characterizes the extreme of his later writing, a complex and often convoluted poetics that has been criticized as “repetitive and obscure, a form of smoke and mirrors.”  He argues that “language speaks man,” (1120) a complete reversal of the traditional contention that speech, and therefore language, is the expression, presentation and representation of the real and unreal.  Heidegger is entirely dedicated to turning this argument on its head, insisting that language is the only pre-existing condition, not humankind.  While the prevalent viewpoint asserts that language could not exist without man, Heidegger asserts that man could not exist without language.  This is the core of his conception of language as the creator of human consciousness, a malleable and omnipresent phenomenological force that “speaks man” by facilitating thought.

   Heidegger develops these conclusions in three parts over the course of “Language.”  The first concerns language, speech and their traditional definitions, the second analyzes a poem by George Trakl, and the third diverges from the analysis to follow a chain of word inventions and associations in order to demonstrate language’s phenomenological power-its ability to form consciousness.  While the first two parts are comparatively straightforward, the third presents Heidegger at his most oblique and circuitous, coiling himself up in a regressive series of definitions of definitions.

   The essay as a whole, however, is not such an affair.  Heidegger opens with the human component to his thesis, a belief that “only speech enables man to be the living being he is as man” (1121).  He asserts that speech alone separates thinking humans from animals, that speech as language and language as speech create “man.”  Such an emphasis on language’s relationship to humans demonstrates that he is ultimately not interested in the structure, nature or essence of language, that set of inflexible observations which are universal about language.  He does not wish to “assault language in order to force it into the grip of ideas already fixed beforehand” (1122), but rather pursue ways that language manifests itself in existence and especially how existence manifests itself through language.  Of all the claims Heidegger makes in “Language,” this caveat most clearly prefigures the poststructuralist reaction against the systematization of language.  Heidegger’s prime interest in discussing language here is to purport language’s elusively creative power, the play of multiple meanings that later writers like Derrida would attach themselves to.  Though the factual utterances of what is and has been spoken may be aligned systematically, language as a preexisting phenomenon cannot be restrained or contained before it manifests itself in human consciousness.  Such is the phenomenological component of Heidegger’s argument, which studies how Being is constructed by human consciousness, a path not far distanced from language’s ontology, or how language “is” language.

   Heidegger’s thesis hinges on the idea that only language manifests the perceptible traits of things of the world, and embodies this in the term ereignis, translated here as “appropriation.”  As he states repeatedly throughout the essay, language is the inaugural granting of things in human consciousness, and the ereignis is that original appearance; that which gives rise to the perception of things.  Heidegger never returns to the question of human-animal separation, however.  Animals, which generally have no language ability, would be understood in this framework to also lack any perception of the things of the world, a conclusion that contradicts common experience.  It is possible that Heidegger’s belief is not that an animal cannot perceive, but cannot think about those perceptions, having no consciousness.  Language, therefore, must be considered as the progenitor of thoughtful perception, the internalization of outside reality in the mind.  A lack of language precludes conscious thought, according to “Language,” relegating animals to mere stimulus-response.  While the biology and psychology of such a conclusion is debatable, Heidegger desires primarily to investigate human language, human consciousness, and the poetry they create together.

   To find poetry, to locate the nexus of influences that give rise to poetry and poetic language, Heidegger must first disrupt the traditional and limiting definitions of speaking, which he believes synonymous with language.  He asks what it means to speak, and details three points of the prevailing answer, which all center on the assumption that speaking is expression.  In this view, speech “presupposes the idea of something internal that utters or externalizes itself” (1123), and represents the real, external world or the internal unreal.  Such a seemingly intuitive and pragmatic definition is anathema to Heidegger, who contends that it limits itself by being “merely logical” (1124).  The religious sentiment that language is of divine origin draws nearer Heidegger’s desires, but only insofar that it separates language from humankind-his ultimate wish is to reject the “identification of language as audible utterance of inner emotions, as human activity, as a representation by image and by concept” (1124).

   To accomplish this, Heidegger calls forth poetry, or that which is “spoken purely” (1124).  In a much too brief definition, Heidegger can only qualify a ‘pure speaking’ as an ‘original speaking.’ He later claims that “everyday language is a forgotten and therefore used-up poem, from which there hardly resounds a call any longer” (1133) but never expounds further on the problems that originality engenders.  He quickly moves on to present a poem that he hopes will reveal what is binding in the “bond between what we think and what we are told by language,” a return to consciousness-construction and phenomenology.  The second section begins with George Trakl’s “Ein Winterabend”, a three-stanza poem that provides for, and is alternatively the perfect manifestation of, Heidegger’s following analysis of both the poem and language itself.  Besides a brief statement of his formalist position that the author’s identity plays no part in the importance or significance of the poem, he initiates a direct description and analysis.

   The dissection of a poem, a hermeneutic procedure to get at its contents, inevitably encounters the expressionistic component of a work-in asking what a text means, one asks what its author is trying to express.  This mode of interpretation is exactly the outdated paradigm that Heidegger wishes to combat, an entrenched concept of language that has not changed in over 2,000 years.  He reiterates that “language is neither expression nor an activity of man,” but that instead, “language speaks” (1126) as a fictive act which neither describes settings or pictures them occurring somewhere in reality.  A poem “images” its contents in the mind of the reader, and the language that “speaks” it is a “manifold enunciating.”  The “enunciation” of a poem’s author is the second in a chain of many similar metaphors that Heidegger enlists to renew language, the first being “speaking” itself.  Over and over again, Heidegger uses these metaphors to describe what language does in order to counter, or stave off, the reader’s perception that they are descriptions.  Given his anti-expressionistic stance on the nature of language, Heidegger could not then use language to merely describe the way he conceives language works.  As a result, he reinvents a host of words (thing, world, bear, bid, speak, dif-ference, pain, still, peal, cor-respond) that take on vague and shifting connotations and denotations.

   “Language,” the essay as well as Heidegger’s subject, constantly struggles with this conflict between describing and being described.  Such a directional discord between seeming opposites and binary systems recurs throughout the essay in different forms.  When Heidegger gets to the core of his analysis of “A Winter Evening,” he encounters the dialectic between “inside/outside,” and proceeds with a detailed proposition that at once structures the poem and “deconstructs” the limits of a binary opposition.

   The first stanza, Heidegger claims, names objects and thus “calls” them into the reader’s consciousness, bringing “the presence of what was previously uncalled into a nearness” (1127).  These operations deal with the reader’s interiority, his individuality and the way things “bear” and “thing” themselves into being to the reader.  This, then, is the “inside” pole of the poem’s dichotomy, which “speaks by bidding the things to come” (1128).  By making the things of the world present inside the poem’s dwelling, the second stanza can then address the world and how it makes things possible by “worlding.”

   By the seventh and eighth lines, the last of the second stanza, the poem “speaks” not by calling “things” into being but by calling the abstract and poetic.  These lines read,

Golden blooms the tree of graces
Drawing up the earth’s cool dew.

and refer to ideas much broader in scope and reference than the simple objects of preceding lines.  To understand “tree of graces” and how it blooms “golden” requires interpretational activity on the part of the reader.  The snow, bell, house and table of the first stanza can be easily initiated into the reader’s consciousness because they are platonic ideals of things.  The “tree of graces” has no immediate meaning, but instead must be constructed from the reader’s own network of associations regarding the concept of “grace.”  Is this, then, the “world” that Heidegger refers to, the “world” that “designates neither the [secular] universe of nature” nor the “whole of entities present” (1129)?  For Heidegger, these two lines conjure the poetic by naming (calling, bringing forth) an “original speaking,” something that does not or cannot preexist consciousness but rather generates it.  This stanza is the “outside” pole of the poem, where “granting” takes place and “world grants to things their presence” (1128).

   The third stanza, then, is a dialectical synthesis and profoundly effective demonstration of how binary oppositions deconstruct themselves.  Heidegger realizes that the “bidding” of things and “granting” of world are different modes of the same operation, two sides of language’s coin, and that inevitably they encounter each other in a reciprocal relationship-for “world and things do not subsist alongside one another[,] they penetrate each other” (1129).  The intimacy of their similarities and dissimilarities are a threshold, a between-space, that Heidegger names the “dif-ference.”

   Furthermore, this dif-ference is manifested explicitly in Trakl’s poem as the “threshold” that “pain has turned … to stone” (1125).  Here, inside and outside penetrate each other, traversing a middle, both in the poem’s world and in Heidegger’s scheme of “things” and “world.”  Neither inside nor outside can exist without the other, independently.  If they then exist together, there will always be some kind of third term that joins and differentiates them.  The dif-ference “calls” the threshold into Being.

   This synthesis is a startling, proto-deconstructionist notion of binary opposites and paradoxes that play, resonating in their difference (and dif-ference, and differánce).  The differences between words are Heidegger’s playground in “Language,” as in the third section where he chants, calls up, a series of words that shed their prosaic meanings and take on new ones that are defined in terms of yet another new word.  On page 1132, “the dif-ference stills the thing…into the world,” but then, stillness is actually a “sounding,” a paradox that Heidegger addresses only by submerging it in further whirlpools  of “gathering,” “pealing,” “listening,” and “hearing.”  Still another paradox crops up when Heidegger asserts that “mortals speak insofar as they listen” (1133).  By putting one term in alliance with instead of opposition to its seeming antonym, Heidegger encourages the ‘play of paradox’ that asks the reader to question the opposition, to allow the possibility of multiple meanings.  The juxtapositions and reversals are provocations, and this in itself is a mode of the “speaking” that language performs.

   To understand Heidegger’s reversal “language speaks man,” for instance, one need only return to the idea of ereignis, that language is the sole facilitator of thoughtful perception.  Heidegger contends that human beings dwell in this appropriation, given that all human Being is a result of consciousness and therefore thoughtful perception.  If language creates all the things of the world in consciousness by the act of “speaking,” then humans, too, are “spoken” by language, and all the accoutrements that humans entail, such as the mind and consciousness itself-all are made manifest, “spoken,” by language.  This then is the fundamental cycle that Heidegger’s language generates: “Language speaks man,” and “man” inevitably speaks language, which speaks “man,” endlessly.  Human Being, and all of existence, is contained within and perpetuated by this cycle, a vast conclusion that places extreme importance on language as making human existence possible.

   This sweeping argument demonstrates the scale and scope of Heidegger’s belief in the power of language, especially poetic language.  For the later Heidegger, poetry and the human imagination are prime movers, and “language is the new house of Being” (1119).  Through metaphor, paradox, and confusion, language and “Language” speak themselves and humankind.  “Language is-language, speech,” Heidegger says, and lays the foundations for nothing less than a totalizing linguistic ontology:

Language speaks.  If we let ourselves fall into the abyss denoted by this sentence, we do not go tumbling into emptiness.  We fall upward, to a height.  Its loftiness opens up a depth.  The two span a realm in which we would like to become at home, so as to find a residence, a dwelling place for the life of man. (1123)

Poem Appendix

“Ein Winterabend,” von George Trakl

Wenn der Schnee ans Fenster fällt,
Lang die Abendglocke läutet,
Vielen ist der Tisch bereitet
Und das Haus ist wohlbestellt.

Mancher auf der Wanderschaft
Kommt ans Tor auf dunklen Pfaden.
Golden blüht der Baum der Gnaden
Aus der Erde kühlem Saft.

Wanderer tritt still herein;
Schmerz versteinert die Schwelle.
Da erglänzt in reiner Helle
Auf dem Tische Brot und Wein.

“A Winter Evening,” by George Trakl
Literal translation by Ted Hayes

When the snow falls on the window,
The Vesper bell tolls long,
The table is readied for many,
And the house is well ordered.

Many on their wanderings
Come to the door on dark paths.
Golden blooms the Tree of Graces
From the Earth’s cool sap.

Wanderer steps quietly herein,
Pain turns the Threshold to Stone.
There shines in pure brightness
On the table bread and wine.

“A Winter Evening,” translated by Albert Hofstadter

Window with falling snow is arrayed,
Long tolls the vesper bell,
The house is provided well,
The table is for many laid.

Wandering ones, more than a few,
Come to the door on darksome courses.
Golden blooms the tree of graces
Drawing up the earth’s cool dew.

Wanderer quietly steps within;
Pain has turned the threshold to stone.
There lie, in limpid brightness shown,
Upon the table bread and wine.

Dweller beyond thresholds, purveyor of uncertainty, but a threshold and uncertain agent itself: Stoker’s Count Dracula has provided over a century’s worth of readers an adventure in Gothic horror as well as an insight into language’s functions and poetics.  Dracula repeatedly resists inquiry into its nature; for the vampire hunters and victims, it is physically evasive.  For the reader and critic, the idea and Idea of Dracula, vampires, and the words themselves are defiantly ambiguous.  These entities and nonentities constitute themselves of thresholds, between-spaces that utilize uncertainty to negotiate between two understandable or ‘present’ terms.  Dracula, history’s most popular and well known vampire, exists as Logos exists: everywhere and nowhere, neither real nor unreal, the deferred presence of signification.

Thresholds, as linkages between two or more terms, manifest themselves physically and rhetorically in Dracula.  Almost any transition from one place or idea to another can be considered a passage through a threshold, provided a physical or rhetorical demarcation between origin and destination.  The most common thresholds are spatial: a home’s doorway is called a threshold, where it delineates inside from outside.  The word threshold originally described the medieval block of wood placed in a doorway to keep the floor covering (thresh) from spilling out.  A threshold, therefore, is something that keeps inside space from becoming outside space; it is a boundary and a margin.

Real and figurative thresholds are vital to Dracula, providing spatial logics, vampiric rules, and ultimately, a scheme for understanding language’s shifting nature.  The spatial importance of between-spaces in the story are manifold.  Within the second page, Jonathan Harker is given the impression that “we were leaving the West and entering the East,” (p. 27) a movement that occurs through the key threshold of the Borgo Pass.  One arrives at this mountain crossing after traveling through the “Mittel Land” (p. 33), a beautiful forest region that lends geographical significance to Transylvania, meaning “the land beyond the forest” (p. 245).

Harker’s experience in and around the Pass begins to change, as “great masses of grayness” in the trees “produced a peculiarly weird and solemn effect” (p. 34).  The other passengers, native and superstitious, become increasingly agitated as they draw nearer to the Pass, and once there, “several of the passengers offered [Harker] gifts,” given with a blessing and “fear-meaning movements” (p. 34), gestures to guard against the evil on the other side of the Pass.  Clearly, the Pass is a dividing point between the peasant’s understandable world and the realm of danger and mystery.

In Todd Browning’s 1930 film Dracula, the Borgo Pass sequence employs a film-negative effect to imply a passage from consciousness to subconsciousness.  The world appears far different from reality with all the colors reversed, the sensation of transgressing a subliminal threshold.  To Harker, “[i]t seemed as though the mountain range had separated two atmospheres, and that now we had got into the thunderous one” (p.35).  Inexplicable phenomena abound on this ‘subliminal’ side, such as the “strange optical effect: when [the driver] stood between me and the flame he did not obstruct it, for I could see its ghostly flicker all the same” (p. 38).  Transylvania is a world of seeming unreality, founded on different rules and principles than the known world.  It is one term of several dichotomies: real and unreal, West and East, and with liberal extensions, even good and evil, and life and death.

The presence of thresholds play an important role in determining the vampire’s abilities.  On page 244, Professor Van Helsing enumerates a list of powers and limitations known from tradition and superstition.  Among these, several regard Dracula’s ability to move about in space, and at least two limitations specifically involves thresholds: “He may not enter anywhere at the first, unless there be some one of the household who bid him to come, though afterward he can come as he please.”  Furthermore, “he can only pass running water at the slack or the flood of the tide.”  Dracula’s physical presence and movement are restricted by inscrutable laws that the vampire hunters come to know through tradition, the collected observation, interpolation and invention of older cultures.  These two particular ‘rules’ are rooted in thresholds.  In the first case, a home’s inside-space is protected from the vampire until the conscious intervention of a human agent.  The threshold of the home, in this situation, is an uncrossable boundary, a limit.  Running water, as in a river, is an equally strong boundary except at the extremes of its cycle, a limitation derived from traditions in which moving water effaces the power and flux of magical forces.

Thresholds, then, are not only spaces allowing passage but also boundaries: the term has no singular existence but exhibits opposing possibilities.  A threshold, moreover, is the negotiating term between two or more other terms.  For Westerners to conceive of a ‘West,’ there must be an ‘East,’ and the meeting of these two regions requires a boundary.  As in the case of the Borgo Pass, the boundary itself can be a space possessing its own qualities, a place that is neither West nor East.  Abstractions like ‘real’ and ‘unreal,’ naturally, have far less defined boundaries, especially in the world of Dracula.  Its protagonists experience numerous phenomena that they can only consider to be ‘unreal,’ yet are apparently occurring ‘in reality.’  The threshold between terms like these is a state of uncertainty, where something otherwise exclusive to one term is in fact mixed with it.

The poststructuralist understanding of this idea is deconstruction.  The two terms of any binary oppositions making up a text are shown to be imbricated in each other, and therefore one term can never be privileged, the other never marginalized.  The result is a kind of deconstructed uncertainty-words, sentences, ideas, etc. having multiple meanings can never settle on one meaning, but instead vacillate between them, producing a multiplicity of texts in the mind of the reader.  In this sense, the given text is really only a threshold (and in other terminologies, a diagram) between the ideas and influences of the author and the resultant ideas of the reader, what the reader forms in her own consciousness.  The threshold space, the text of shifting denotations and connotations, is a space of uncertainty.

And uncertainty abounds in Dracula.  The actions and motives of its antagonist are almost always uncertain, plunging the hunters into fear and doubt.  The antagonist itself is, in fact, an agent of uncertainty, capable of myriad forms and designs but reducible to no single form.  Count Dracula is metamorphic, shifting and changing between states, and is evidently exempt from many previously known ‘laws of nature.’  As Van Helsing details, in eccentric English, “[Dracula] throws no shadow; he make in the mirror no reflect.”  “He can transform himself to wolf . . . he can be as bat.”  “He can come in mist which he create.”  “He come on moonlight rays as elemental dust.”  “He become so small,” and “slip through a hairbreadth space . . .” (p. 244)  The Professor assumes, however, that Dracula’s default form is his human-like guise, that is, in the apparent body of a once-human.

What manner of Form is this, or what manner of Idea is it in the semblance of Form?  Dracula’s ‘human’ form cannot be assumed to be the vampire’s definitive nature-it reappears as animal, as mist, as storms.  An uncertain agent such as Dracula is like a quantum particle: when not being observed, its state is completely indeterminate.  No speculation can assume perfect accuracy, and most importantly, it is impossible to predict its exact nature with full certainty.  This is the keystone of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which states that any act of observation inevitably changes the object being observed.  Before Dracula’s crate of earth is opened, or Lucy’s tomb uncovered, no entity can predict what the vampire’s nature is.  Perhaps, at rest, the vampire is discontinuous, like Van Helsing’s “elemental dust,” or perhaps it simply has no form whatsoever.  Van Helsing says of the dormant, vampire Lucy, “[i]t is her body, and yet not it” (p. 221).  Speculation on an unobservable form is endless and fruitless.

Similarly, Dracula’s state of ‘undeath’ is a prime example of uncertainty.  Between the two extremes of Life and Death-a binary opposition fundamental to all cultures-lies this threshold state where the undead appears to have capabilities of the living.  Dracula can move in space, interact and communicate physically with the living, but “cannot die by mere passing of the time” (p. 244).  It can sustain damage to its body with no danger to its continued existence, unless certain, prescribed actions are taken.  Dracula is clearly not alive in any sense we are familiar with, but cannot be dead.  The undead vampire is not only a passive dweller in an uncertain threshold, but an active entity with an agency of its own.

If Dracula is, then, an uncertain agent, special consideration must be given to the fact that it does not appear in mirrors.

I had hung my shaving glass by the window, and was just beginning to shave.  Suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder, and heard the Count’s voice saying to me, “Good-morning.”  I started, for it amazed me that I had not seen him, since the reflection of the glass covered the whole room behind me.  . . . I turned to the glass again to see how I had been mistaken.  This time there could be no error, for the man was close to me, and I could see him over my shoulder.  But there was no reflection of him in the mirror!  The whole room behind me was displayed; but there was no sign of a man in it, except myself.

(p. 50)

Poor Jonathan is able to observe the Count directly, but not in a mirror.  It is as if the impressionable human mind can perceive Dracula’s indeterminate, threshold state, but its presence in a mirror would be privileging-by proving to physics-only one of the vampire’s many possible forms.  What presence Dracula does have is deferred: the ideal vampire is never present, rather only one ‘material’ form of it at a time.  The effect in the novel is uncanny, formulated from tradition and superstition to contribute an uneasy sense of unreality to the reader.  Schematically, the mirror is as immune to agents of uncertainty as the threshold of a still-sacred home.

Furthermore, the threshold state of uncertainty affects not only vampires: several characters come into the vampire’s sway, and for humans, the effect is to risk ‘madness.’  A ‘sane’ human is one that operates under a certain level of certainty: one who is comfortable assuming that the sun will rise in the east every morning, that an apple dropping from a tree will fall to the earth instead of the sky.  In everyday life, we feel we can be certain about these things; there is no wavering between real and unreal, no experience of the threshold between them.  When we do experience such a state (and it could be in a well-designed haunted house, a subversive film, or Harker’s trip to the Carpathians), the effect is uncanny-unheimlich, in Freud’s original German, not home-like.  The experience of phenomena outside our realm of certainty (such as the home) leads us into uncertain territory, the threshold state in which we can not be sure of reality or unreality, and the extreme of this state is perceived as ‘madness.’

Dracula’s principal madman is, of course, Renfield, a human lunatic under the powerful influence of the vampire.  Dr. Seward, in charge of studying such lunacy, commits himself to detailing and cataloguing Renfield’s many symptoms.  Renfield continually refers to an unseen ‘Master,’ eats lower life-forms in order to append or increase his own ‘life-force,’ and exhibits erratic and sometimes unpredictable behavior.  To those still within the home-like realm of certainty, Renfield is unquestionably insane.  He hears, sees, understands and interprets ‘reality’ much differently than others, because of his proximity to the story’s ultimate agent of uncertainty, Dracula.  But as the hunters progress and learn more about the ‘true reality’ within the novel, they begin to understand the causes of Renfield’s affliction.  By the end, they have formulated an entirely new conception of the situation, one in which Renfield’s insanity is the result of Dracula’s aura of uncertainty.  Jonathan Harker, too, is driven close to the brink of unrecoverable insanity within Dracula’s castle, the undisputed vortex of the real-unreal threshold, where neither reality nor unreality exist, but only wavering, vacillating uncertainty.

By now, there is little doubt to Dracula’s indeterminacy.  John Paul Riquelme, in his deconstruction of the novel, catalogues a panoply of oppositions and pairings that undermine any singular reading.  But we can take one more associative leap in our understanding of Dracula as composed of uncertain thresholds: that the character of Dracula itself, as an uncertain agent, is an analogue to words themselves.  Ross C. Murfin, in his overview of deconstruction (p. 540), reminds us:

As Saussure demonstrated, words are not the things they name and, indeed, they are only arbitrarily associated with those things.  A word, like any sign, is what Derrida has called a “deferred presence”; that is to say, “the signified concept is never present in itself,” and “every concept is necessarily . . inscribed in a chain or system, within which it refers to another and to other concepts” (“Différence” 138, 140).

Dracula, the vampire that harasses the Harkers, Lucy, Seward, et al, is only a sign of the vampire concept, a manifestation of the idea of ‘vampire.’  The sign ‘Dracula,’ its name, would refer to a contiguous body in a human, but without any determinate corporeal existence to be signified, ‘Dracula’ signs to a disintegrated threshold state of uncertainty.  Dracula is a deferred presence, and as demonstrated, there is no ‘real’ Dracula, only the particular manifestation observable at any one time.  All signifiers suffer potentially from such indeterminacy, as Saussure observed, as arbitrary units, and take on meaning only when we associate them with concepts, which in turn are only networks of other signs.  Derrida’s deconstruction arose out of recognition that when a word has multiple potential meanings, no single meaning can necessarily be privileged, and that instead all the meanings must be present at the same time, in the same space.

Because a reader inevitably reforms the text in her consciousness, interpreting the text at will, pursuant to her influences and subconscious desires, it is impossible to conceive of a text having an inherent, authoritative meaning.  The author herself biases the writing and reading of her own text as it is written, and all readers bias it as they re-write it into their consciousness.  The character/text Dracula is an agent of uncertainty just as a word, logos, is an agent of varied interpretability.  A word’s deconstructed state, when its many meanings float on equal levels, is the threshold of uncertainty between one meaning and another.  Dracula, the paradox of life and death, hovers in several simultaneous states just as the word ‘undead’ represents several simultaneous and conflicting meanings.  So let us not dwell for too long in entirely deconstructed language, for to fall under the sway of such an agent of uncertainty is to risk madness.

Ted Hayes, October 2004, Gainesville, FL