Dracula Gramophone

The article draws on two 1987 lectures by Derrida, collected under the general heading, Ulysse Gramophone, for its own title. Its basic aim is to register the full (and so far little explored) impact of the sense of hearing, and of the auditory imagination, on and within Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Departing from the obvious approach via a general theory of the visible (and the invisible), it focuses on the various novelistic strategies bent on recording, typing, harking (cf. Jonathan Harker) and intoning, while taking into account the means, both technological (gramophone) and supernatural (vampiric “sound bites”), whereby “negative audition” (achieved via hypnosis) and Verstimmung are enacted in the writing itself. Based on various scriptural and semantic devices (e.g. the C/K divide modeled on the Barthesian S/Z) and organized around four emblematic citations lifted from the novel, it ends on an emphatic vindication of the “tone of the revenant”, in the words of Baudelaire (freely) translating Thomas de Quincey’s Suspiria De Profundis