Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

93“The Custom-House”an archive 28of the pastis invested in the economy of ethicalresponsibility. Structured around the responsibility of the modals “should, ought to,”Hawthorne’s paratext 29 was written to supplement and illuminate The Scarlet Letter. The fact isthat the narrator/author is so enchanted by the ghostly fictional conjuration of Pue that the lines ofdemarcation between his fictional re-creation and reality collapse at the threshold of The ScarletLetter. Thus, it is crucial to stress how this fictional re-creation attaches to a prosopoeticrepresentation whose function is to blur the distinction between presence and absence and todefine the temporality of the sign and the subject.“The Custom-House” conflates narrational and authorial voices. Hawthorne is writingabout his life as inspector of customs revenue and he adds to that the fact that he found an actualscarlet letter and an actual roll of explanatory manuscript. This amalgamation of fiction andreality is linked to the literary national anxiety and, of course, the desire to establish a distinctive,post-colonial American literature, and thus to find a useable subject in the American past.Anxious as he is, Hawthorne is trying to find something interesting in the “Custom-House”, as he“chanced to lay [his] hand on a small package, carefully done up in a piece of ancient yellowparchment” (28). The “fine red cloth” of the letter is “greatly frayed and defaced” (29). Themateriality of the letter signifies its temporality. However, the re-turn of the letter becomes onlyvisible as a ghost to witness the mourning of the dead fathera compulsion to repeat and animpulsion to remember. In the final scaffold scene, the visibility of the invisible Dimmesdale’sguilt inflected letter A correlates with the invisibility of the visible letter A of Hester.Dimmesdale’s returning to the haunted Custom House, a re-turn that is invested in theprosopoetic re-surfacing of Hawthorne’s lost love-objects, addresses the fact that the dead are