Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

89Derridean logic, one can say that Hawthorne’s narrative is a haunted text that primarily hauntsHawthorne himself. Haunted by and obsessed with the letter of the dead fathers, Hawthorne’snarrative remains under the shadow of the Father. This intertext, having the function of theshadow, explains the textual mise en scène. Using Kristeva’s term “transposition,” 26 I want toemphasize the fact that to move from the past to the present and vice versa is a relational activity.It is during transposition that indeterminacy emerges. Stable meaning and coherent subjectivityare under siege and threatened by the multiplicity of interpretations. Donald Pease expands thatHawthorne “returned from the past, moreover, with a different moral faculty for the Americanpeople to exercise: a collective memory capable of re-establishing their relation to purposes fromthe past in need of present enactment” (46). In this respect, the force of the letter, its performativeeffect on the characters and the reader alike, is paradoxically its weakness and its impossibility.At the end of the story, Dimmesdale, along with the reader, finds himself embracing his ownletter, yet always without actually holding it.The A floats freely within a structure of endless symbols and allegories. Throughout itsnarrative trajectory, the scarlet letter remains mired in its sheer materiality, in the literalcircumstantial reality of its readers, who project onto it what they want to see and believe. Theresult of this transcendental chain of signification is that the reader is caught in the labyrinth ofhermeneutics. Semantic determinacy is always already put under erasure by the free play of signs.The point I want to raise is that the letter A does not engage in dialogue, although it engages inthe play of the gaze. It conducts a monologue with the voidthe indexation of the materiality ofthe subject. However, everything corresponds discursively in Hawthorne’s narrative includinginanimate letters. Everyone in The Scarlet Letter speaks of the letter A. All critics and readers