Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

95Examining Hawthorne’s narrative and from the point of view of Freud’s theory of mourning andmelancholia and Abraham and Torok’s theory of the crypt, one can say that reading is itselfstructured around necrophilic desireprosopoetic desire writ large. Whatever biographical,textual, or historical background the reader has can only be a dead man’s remnant. The remnantsof the melancholic figures or corpses that populate Hawthorne’s narrative tend toward ontologicaland historical recognition. Recognized and reorganized, the figures in “The Custom-House” andThe Scarlet Letter reconfigure the American Gothic by defining its elements and contours.Prosopoetically determined, the destination of one letter is the departure point for anotherperson. This circularity of correspondence extends the circle of The Scarlet Letter. The breakingof the traditional structures and the deconstruction of canonical traditions frees the letteratextto float endlessly. In The Scarlet Letter, letters forever cross in a transitional and relationalmode. Hester’s letter is Dimmesdale’s; Dimmesdale’s letter is Chillingworth’s; the narrator’sletter is also the reader’s. As a result, meaning is never fully graspedit is always in the processof doing, undoing, and re-doing. If the letter A is both laid open and encrypted, concealing andcanceling, then as long as the letter as a signature is not authenticated, it cannot be accreditedexcept by another, by the reader. Although the letter A indexes continually what is precisely disnarrated,excluded from representation (i.e., Hester’s adultery), it becomes an empty signifierunable to signify. As Henry James puts it, Hawthorne “goes too far and is in danger of crossingthe line that separates the sublime from its intimate neighbor” (94). Naming and un-namingadultery, the letter A stages Hester’s attempt to avoid the law. Hester attempts to evade the law bythe “sin” of sex and also by the subversive manufacture of the letter, and by the freedom ofspeculation that it earns for her. However, the law, much like ideology, works implicitly and