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88Hester’s shame although the word “adultery” is not spelled out in the novel, rather perhaps likethe word “slavery” that is not mentioned in the American founding documents.Hawthorne’s narrative can be said to possess a biographical and autobiographicalunconscious, one whose contents are perhaps all the more meaningful for their being largelyunavailable, repressed. In Writing and Difference, Derrida posits that:totalization no longer has any meaning, not because the infiniteness of a field cannot becovered by a finite glance or a finite discourse, but because the nature of the field – thatis, language and a finite language – excludes totalization. This field is in effect that ofplay, that is to say, a field of infinite substitutions only because it is finite, that is to say,because instead of being an inexhaustible field, as in the classical hypothesis, instead ofbeing too large, there is something missing from it: a center which arrests and grounds theplay of substitutions. (289)Hawthorne’s narrative reveals an ideologically suspect unwillingness to relinquish theproblematic fantasy of stable subjects for a more sophisticated if less comforting concept of thesubject as dispersed, multiple, more other than itself. In fact, Hawthorne’s ‘apparent’ desire topreserve the fixity of the subject is ideologically driven. Insofar as he intended this to be a moraltale, then it would require a certain fixity of the subject in order to consolidate the object-lesson.In “The Death of the Author,” Barthes argues that “writing is that neutral, composite, obliquespace where our subject slips away, where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of thebody writing” (142). Hawthorne’s narrative is quite different from yet dependent upon itsreferents or sources. Riffaterre gestures toward a hidden intertext which gives meaning to thetext. Read in light of Riffaterre’s model of intertextuality, Hawthorne’s narrative maybeconsidered as a “generalized, all encompassing catachresis” (Semiotics of Poetry 21). By this